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On April Fools’ Day, Donald Trump addressed the nation about the Iran War. It would have been too painful to listen to his adenoidal droning and borscht-belt insult comedian shtick, so I just read the transcript. He said nothing new. It was just a live version of his social media tweets: rambling, mendacious, self-contradictory, delusional, emotionally labile, and laced with insults and threats. I wish he were joking, but he probably wasn’t.

When it was all over, however, I was certain of one thing: Trump has learned nothing so far. So he’s going to send in ground troops.

Trump thinks he’s already won several times over because he doesn’t understand asymmetric warfare and consistently underestimates his enemies. He’s been fed a steady stream of videos of American and Israeli airstrikes on Iran, including strikes on civilian infrastructure, which constitute war crimes that he thinks he and his goons will never answer for.

He doesn’t understand that Iran’s leaders knew that they could not fight America by matching its military spending, equipment, and tactics: vast numbers of jets, tanks, naval vessels, missile interceptors, etc. Saddam Hussein tried that, and the US steamrolled him twice, because there’s no way to outspend the United States on military gadgets.

Iran didn’t just learn from Saddam’s defeat in Iraq. They also learned from America’s defeat by Iraq’s low-tech, asymmetric, open-source insurgency, which found low-cost ways of destroying American personnel and exhausting expensive military supplies while living on to fight. Imagine what they could have done with drones.

In the run up to the current Iran War, I compared four sets of numbers.

Racist that I am, I confess I was a bit surprised by the upper end of Iran’s IQ ranking. But the rest of the numbers did not bode well for Iran. Of course, when one does these sorts of comparisons, there’s always a proviso: “Other things being equal, Iran doesn’t have a chance against America in terms of military spending, military size, and population.”

Yet Iran is still fighting—and, I would argue, winning—five weeks later because they didn’t let other things remain equal.

The ancient Socratic philosopher Aeschines of Sphettus reported that when Themistocles of Athens contemplated the invading army of Darius of Persia, he knew that the Greeks were vastly outnumbered. But he did not despair, because he recognized that no matter how vast and well-equipped, an army is only as good as the wisdom of its commander. By the same token, a smaller and weaker army can still win if its forces are deployed wisely. Themistocles proved wiser and beat Darius in the end.

As Socrates taught, wisdom is the great equalizer. Folly can bring down the mightiest empires, whereas wisdom can make a great state from a small city. America is run by fools. Iran, apparently, is run by philosophers.

It is folly to attack an enemy’s strengths from a position of weakness. It is wise to attack an enemy’s weaknesses from a position of strength. That’s the essence of asymmetric warfare.

Thus Iran did not invest in a navy to match America’s navy. It did not invest in an air force to match America’s air force. The Iranians even accepted the fact that the United States would basically control its skies, so they didn’t invest in air defense systems to take down American jets. They probably also accepted that they could not counter the enemy’s electronic and human intelligence gathering.

Thus the Iranians came up with ways of hardening themselves to these disadvantages. First, they created a decentralized command structure to make Iran less vulnerable to electronic spying and assassinations of leaders. Second, they focused on two technologies: drones and ballistic missiles. These can be countered by missile interceptors. But interceptors are expensive and thus in short supply. So Iran concentrated on making their drones and missiles cheap and plentiful. Interceptors also depend on expensive radar systems for targeting. To protect their drones and missiles from American and Israeli air power, Iran has built “missile cities” of hardened concrete deep underground, out of the reach of America’s most powerful bombs. The entrances to these missile cities have been attacked again and again. But each city has the personnel and equipment necessary to dig them out quickly.

Iran has used its missiles and drones very effectively: to destroy expensive American radar equipment, to soak up large numbers of expensive interceptors, and to destroy American military bases around the Gulf. Their strategy is to use cheap drones and missiles to exhaust American and Israeli countermeasures, then use their more expensive and deadly weapons. ZOG’s counter-strategy seems to be to attempt to destroy the missiles and drones underground. It hasn’t worked so far. So ZOG is going to try something else.

At this point, “something else” basically means two things: declare victory and go home—or send in ground troops and hope for the best.

If Trump declares victory and goes home, the Strait of Hormuz will be in the hands of the Iranians, who are allowing cargoes to pass if they are not priced in dollars. For more than 50 years, the Gulf monarchies have priced their exports in US dollars, which they then invest in US assets, including low-yield treasury bonds, which allow the US to service enormous debts. Without the petrodollar, the US government will be insolvent.

The petrodollar system was based on a quid pro quo: use American dollars in exchange for American protection. Iran has demonstrated that America cannot and will not protect the Gulf states. Given a choice between protecting the Gulf states and Israel, Israel will always come first. Iran is fully capable of destroying the Gulf states’ exports, rendering the area uninhabitable, and sending the global economy to the Fourth World. That’s clearly their “Sampson Option” if, for example, the US and Israel actually do topple Iran’s leaders or use nuclear weapons.

The doom of the petrodollar was sealed recently when Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates to help secure them from Iranian drone attacks. Jordan and Kuwait will probably sign agreements as well. Ukraine has spent the last four years perfecting drone warfare technology and tactics in their war with Russia, which is using Iranian drone technology.

Why should we expect the Gulf states to continue using dollars when America has brought them to the brink of destruction and they have been forced to turn to Ukraine for help?

The Trump administration has, naturally, protested this deal, because they want the Gulf states to remain dependent, and they want Ukraine to lose. Given that Trump has insulted both Zelenskyy and Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (who is effectively the king because his father, King Salman, is senile), I am sure the agreement was personally satisfying as well.

There’s a memorable scene in David Lynch’s Dune where the Emperor of the Known Universe, Shaddam IV squirms in impotent rage as he is ordered by the Spacing Guild to invade Arrakis and get the spice flowing again—or spend the rest of his life in a “pain amplifier.”

Trump is being bombarded with calls to stop the war for economic, political, and humanitarian reasons. But America’s equivalent of the Spacing Guild is telling him that if the petrodollar tanks, there will be no more dewy, sunlit putting greens in his future.

Thus Trump will choose the slimmest hope of victory (and personal survival) to the inevitability of defeat. So he will gamble away the lives of American troops on a ground invasion of Iran.

There’s not a single competent person in the Pentagon who would tell Trump that he can successfully invade a country three times the size of Iraq with a tiny fraction of the troops deployed in the Iraq War of 2003.

But Trump is a consummate narcissist who does not like being contradicted, thus he will fire people who say “no” to him. He will also scapegoat underlings rather than take responsibility for his failures. Thus, just last Friday, I said that the people surrounding Trump will soon face a choice: “Trump or us.”

So it comes as no surprise that just yesterday, we learned that Pete Hegseth has fired three generals: U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, Army Gen. David Hodne, and Army Maj. Gen. William Green. We also learned that Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, and there are rumors that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is next. I am betting that Gabbard and the three generals were advising against a ground invasion.

This is how empires end: fools are put in charge, sycophants enable them, and those who know better are too cowardly to speak out.

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2026/04/theres-going-to-be-a-ground-invasion-of-iran/

Philip K. Dick’s 1968 science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is far less famous than Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner, which is loosely based on the novel. A few of the novel’s characters and dramatic situations, as well as bits of dialogue, found their way into Blade Runner, often shorn of the context in which they made sense. But the movie and novel dramatically diverge on the fundamental question of what makes human beings different from androids, and in terms of the “myths” that provide the deep structure of their stories.[1]

In Blade Runner, what separates androids from humans is their lack of memories, whereas in the novel it is their lack of empathy. In the novel, the underlying myth is the passion of the Christ, specifically his persecution at the hands of the Jews (both the Jews who called for his death and their present-day descendants, who continue to mock him and his followers). In Blade Runner, however, it is the rebellion of Satan against God—and this time, Satan wins by murdering God.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is set in 1992 in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a side trip to Seattle. After World War Terminus, the earth’s atmosphere is polluted by vast radioactive dust clouds. Many animal species are extinct, and the rest are extremely rare, so animals are highly valued, both for religious reasons and as status symbols, and there is a brisk market in electric animals. (Hence the title.)

To escape the dust, most human beings have emigrated to off-world colonies. (Mars is mentioned specifically.) As an incentive, emigrants are given androids as servants and slave laborers. (They are called “replicants” in the movie, but not in the book.) These androids are not machines, like electric sheep. They are artificially created living human beings. They are created as full-grown humans and live only four years. Aside from their short lifespans, androids differ from human beings by lacking empathy. In essence, they are sociopaths. Androids are banned from earth, and violators are hunted down and “retired” by bounty hunters. (The phrase “blade runner” does not appear in the book.)

The novel never makes clear why androids return to earth, which is inhabited only by genetically malformed “specials” and mentally-retarded “chickenheads,” who are not allowed to emigrate, and a remnant of normal humans who refuse to emigrate and are willing to risk the dust and endure lifelessness and decay because of their attachment to the earth. Earth does make sense as a destination, however, given the androids’ status as slaves in the off-world colonies and their short lifespans, which obviates concerns about long-term damage from the dust.

I wish to argue that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? can be read as a systematic Christian and anti-Semitic allegory. Naturally, I do not argue that this brief but rich and suggestive novel can be reduced entirely to this dimension. But I argue that this is the mythic backbone of the narrative and indicates that Philip K. Dick had thought a good deal about Jews and the Jewish question.

Historical Christianity plays no role in the novel. The only religion mentioned is called Mercerism, which of course brings to mind “mercy.” Mercerism apparently arose after WWT, as a reaction to the mass death of human beings and animals, which led the survivors to place a high value on empathy. Given its emphasis on empathy, Mercerism is an experiential religion, facilitated by a device called the Empathy Box, which has a cathode ray tube with handles on each side. When one switches on the Empathy Box and grasps the handles, one’s consciousness is merged with other Mercerists as they experience the passion of Wilbur Mercer, an old man who trudges to the top of a hill as unseen tormentors throw stones at him. At the Golgotha-like summit, the torments intensify. Mercer then dies and descends into the underworld, from which he rises like Jesus, Osiris, Dionysus, and Adonis—and, like the latter three, brings devastated nature back to life along with him.

According to Mercer’s back story, he was found by his adoptive parents as an infant floating in a life raft (like Moses). As a young man, he had an unusual empathic connection with animals. He had the power to bring dead animals back to life (like Jesus, although Jesus did not deign to resurrect mere animals). The authorities, called the “adversaries” (“Satan” means “adversary”) and “The Killers,” arrested Mercer and bombarded his brain with radioactive cobalt to destroy his ability to resurrect the dead. This plunged Mercer into the world of the dead, but at a certain point, Mercer conquered death and brought nature back to life. His passion and resurrection are somehow recapitulated in the experience of the old man struggling to the top of the hill, dying, descending into the world of the dead, and ascending again. (The incoherence of the story may partly be a commentary on religion and partly a reflection of the fact that our account of Mercerism is recollected by a mentally subnormal “chickenhead.”)

If Mercerism is about empathy towards other humans and creation as a whole, his adversaries, The Killers, are those that lack empathy and instead exploit animals and other human beings. If Mercerism is analogous to Christianity, The Killers are analogous to Jews. And, indeed, in the Old Testament, the Jews are commanded by God to exploit nature and other men.

The androids, because they lack empathy, are natural Killers. Thus bounty hunter Rick Deckard explicitly likens androids to The Killers: “For Rick Deckard, an escaped humanoid robot, which had killed its master, which had been equipped with an intelligence greater than that of many human beings, which had no regard for animals, which possessed no ability to feel empathic joy for another life form’s success or grief at its defeat—that, for him, epitomized The Killers.”[2]

Of course, although the androids epitomize The Killers, they are not the only ones who lack empathy. Earth has been devastated because human politicians and industrialists had less feeling for life than for political prestige and adding zeroes to their bank accounts. This is precisely why Mercerism puts a premium on empathy. A scene in which the androids cut off the legs of a spider just for the fun of it makes clear why they must be hunted down and killed. Mercer commands his followers “You shall kill only the killers” (ibid.). If only human Killers could be “retired” as well.

The android lack of empathy is the basis of the Voight-Kampff test, which can detect androids by measuring their weak responses to the sufferings of animals and other human beings. (The rationale for the Voight-Kampff test is completely absent from Blade Runner, in which humans and androids are differentiated in terms of memories, not empathy.)

The Killers and the androids are not, however, characterized merely by lack of empathy but also by excess of intelligence, which for the androids expresses itself in intellectual arrogance and condescension toward the chickenhead J. R. Isidore. Intellectuality combined with arrogance are, again, stereotypically Jewish traits. By contrast, Mercerism, because it is based on empathy rather than intellect, can embrace all feeling beings, even chickenheads.

The androids Deckard is hunting are manufactured by the Rosen Association in Seattle, Rosen being a stereotypically Jewish name (at least in America). (In Blade Runner, it is the Tyrell Corporation, Tyrell being an Anglo-Saxon name.) The aim of the Rosen Association is perfect crypsis: androids that cannot be distinguished from humans by any test, even though this agenda conflicts with the aims of the civil authorities to root out all android infiltrators. Deckard notes that “Androids . . . had . . . an innate desire to remain inconspicuous” (p. 529). Crypsis is, of course, an ancient Jewish art, necessary for the diaspora to blend in among their host communities. The Rosen Association obviously has higher loyalties than to the civil authorities, and Jews are notorious for protecting their own people, even criminals, from the civil authorities of their host societies.

The Rosen Association tasks an android named Rachel Rosen (a very Jewish name) to protect rogue androids by seducing bounty hunters. Apparently, sex with an android creates something of an empathic bond, at least from the human point of view, which inhibits them from killing androids. Rachel thus plays the role of Queen Esther, the Jewish woman who wedded Ahasuerus, a mythical king of Persia, and used their relationship to protect her people and destroy their persecutor Haman.

One of the most surreal episodes in the novel ensues when Rick Deckard interviews android soprano Luba Luft in her dressing room at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. (In the down-market Blade Runner, she is Zhora, the stripper with the snake.) Before Deckard can complete his interview and “retire” her, Luft turns the tables by calling the police.

Deckard is promptly arrested and discovers that San Francisco has another, parallel police department staffed primarily by humans but headed by an android who, of course, watches out for the interests of his fellow androids. Granted, an entire parallel police department is a rather implausible notion. A more plausible scenario would be the infiltration of the existing police department. But the episode strictly parallels techniques of Jewish subversion in the real world. For instance, the fact that US foreign policy is more responsive to Israeli interests than American interests is clearly the result of the over-representation of ethnically-conscious Jews and their allies among American policy- and opinion-makers. Jews seek positions of power and influence in the leading institutions of their host societies, subverting them into serving Jewish interests at the expense of the host population.

When Deckard frees himself from the fake police department and tracks down Luba Luft, he notices that, although she does not come with him willingly, “she did not actively resist; seemingly she had become resigned. Rick had seen that before in androids, in crucial situations. The artificial life force that animated them seemed to fail if pressed too far . . . at least in some of them. But not all” (p. 529). This brings to mind Holocaust stories of Jews allowing themselves to be passively herded en masse to their deaths without so much as a kvetch. (This seems unlikely, for based on my experience, Jews do not lack self-assertion.)

The final anti-Semitic dimension of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is its treatment of the media. Only two media outlets are mentioned, one private and the other owned by the government. (Hollywood is also defunct. Dick’s ability to envision the future obviously failed him here.) The privately owned media broadcasts the same talk show, Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends, on both radio and television 23 hours a day. How is this possible? Buster and his friends are androids, of course. But who owns Buster and his friends? The Killers, i.e., the Jews and their spiritual equivalents.

This can be inferred from the fact that Buster and his friends make a point of mocking Mercerism, just as the Jewish media mock Christianity (pp. 487–88). Killers and androids are hostile to Mercerism because their lack of empathy excludes them from the communal fusion that is the religion’s central practice. Thus Isidore concluded that “[Buster] and Wilbur Mercer are in competition. . . . Buster Friendly and Mercerism are fighting for control of our psychic souls” (pp. 488, 489). It is a struggle between empathy and cold, sociopathic intellect.

Near the end of the novel, Buster Friendly goes beyond mockery by broadcasting an exposé showing that Mercerism is a fraud. The rock-strewn slope is a sound stage, the moonlit sky a painted backdrop, and Mercer himself is just an old drunk named Al Jarry hired to act the part of the suffering savior. Mercerism, we are told, is merely a mind control device manipulated by politicians to make the public more tractable—just the opiate of the masses.

The androids are delighted, of course, because if Mercerism is a fraud, then maybe so too is empathy, the one thing that allegedly separates androids from human beings. And empathy can be fake, because in the very first chapter of the novel, we learn of the existence of a device called the Penfield Mood Organ, which can induce any mood imaginable if you just input the correct code.

The exposé is true. But none of it matters, because the magic of Mercerism still works. J. R. Isidore has a vision of Mercer without the empathy box, and Mercer gives him the spider mutilated by the androids, miraculously restored to life. Mercer himself admits the truth of the exposé to Isidore, but still it does not matter. Then Mercer appears to Deckard and helps him kill the remaining androids. Near the end of the novel, Mercer appears to Deckard again and leads him to a toad, a species previously thought to be extinct, which deeply consoles Deckard. His wife Iran, however, discovers the toad is mechanical. The spider probably is as well. But even these fake animals do not undermine the healing magic of Mercerism.

I wish to suggest that Dick’s point is that the historical dimension of Mercerism—and, by implication, of Christianity—does not matter. It can all be fake: the incarnation, the sacrifices, even the miracles can be fake. But the magic still works. This is, in short, a version of the Gnostic doctrine of “Docetism”: the idea that the Christ is an entirely spiritual being and his outward manifestations, including the incarnation, are not metaphysically real.

This may be the sense of J. R. Isidore’s perhaps crack-brained account of a widespread view of Mercer’s nature: “. . . Mercer, he reflected, isn’t a human being; he evidently is an entity from the stars, superimposed on our culture by a cosmic template. At least that’s what I’ve heard people say . . .” (p. 484). A more likely account is that Mercer is a spiritual entity who takes on material forms imposed by our cultural template. Mercer can also employ technological fakery, such as Penfield Mood Organs, mechanical animals, and cheap cinematic tricks, to effect genuine spiritual transformations.

If this is the case, then Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? can be read as offering the template of a revived Gnostic Christianity that is immune to the Jewish culture of critique.

Counter-Currents, April 4, 2014

Afterword

When I decided to become an open white advocate, I simply dropped all contact with people I knew in academia. In case the enforcers of political correctness approached them, I wanted them to be able to say honestly that they had lost touch with me long ago. Frankly, I also wanted to spare myself the experience of being snubbed by them when my politics came up. I violated that policy twice by getting in touch with old contacts, and in both cases, I regretted it.

I should have extended that policy to making new contacts in academia as well. But when a commenter at Counter-Currents suggested I submit my Androids essay to a scholarly conference on Dick taking place at Cal State Fullerton in the spring of 2016, I submitted it on a whim, in unaltered form, thinking that if it were accepted, I would expand upon it considerably. For one thing, I needed to take into account existing Dick scholarship. I was pleasantly surprised when it was accepted for the program.

After the program was announced, however, my title piqued the interests of Jewish antisemitism monitors, who looked into me. Then they contacted the conference organizer, David Sandner, a professor at Cal State Fullerton, who immediately dropped me from the program when he was made aware of my views.

Sandner dropped me on the pretext that the essay had been previously published. I didn’t think that was fair, since many conferences accept papers based simply on an abstract, and I viewed the published essay as merely the seed of the more academic paper I planned to present. But still, I felt bad for exposing Dr. Sandner to the PC terror.

I only found out about the behind-the-scenes machinations that led to my disinvitation much later from an article on the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles website.[3] And that’s how my second academic career was nipped in the bud.

[1] See my review of Blade Runner in Trevor Lynch, Son of Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).

[2] Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s, ed. Jonathan Lethem (New York: Library of America, 2007), p. 456.

[3] “Philip K. Dick Conference Disinvites White Separatist,” Jewish Journal, April 26, 2016.

Whenever someone says, “We need a great White Nationalist novel,” I hand them The Camp of the Saints, for as a depiction of white dispossession and a call to racial awareness, Jean Raspail’s 1973 masterpiece has never been equaled or bettered.

The Camp of the Saints is a beautifully written book, filled with aphoristic turns of phrase worthy of Nietzsche. The narrative is gripping. The characters are vividly drawn and feel real. But I don’t want to linger over its literary qualities. I will let you discover those pleasures on your own. Instead, I want to focus on its message.

The Camp of the Saints is obviously a dystopian novel. The purpose of every dystopian novel is to be wrong. Such books are warnings. If they are successful warnings later generations can smugly dismiss them as mistaken. Raspail went to his grave in 2020, at the age of 94, with the gnawing feeling that he had been right. The Camp of the Saints was written as a prophecy, but with each passing year, it reads more like the daily news.

The Camp of the Saints also belongs to another genre: the murder mystery. The victim is the white race. But Raspail leaves it to us to unravel the identity of the killers and figure out how the crime was committed. If we can do so, maybe we can halt the same crime that is happening to our race today.

Initially, The Camp of the Saints is depressing, but its overall effect is to raise your fighting spirit. Still, a fighting spirit means nothing unless you can direct it intelligently. Raspail has much to teach us here. Distilling those lessons is the purpose of this essay.

Here’s the basic story: there is famine in India. About a million starving refugees under the leadership of a massive Hindu known as the “turd eater” and his misshapen dwarf son head for Europe by commandeering a fleet of rusting ships.

In Europe all the leading voices of the churches, the political Left, and the Leftist-dominated establishment frenziedly extend a welcome in the name of human brotherhood, white guilt, and the absurd idea that we get richer by sharing everything with beggars. But perhaps we deserve it for our sins.

As the fleet draws closer, more and more whites have reservations. But they do nothing to stop the migration because they are cowed by the media, the churches, and their own consciences, which have been shaped by nearly 2000 years of Christianity, several centuries of liberal humanism, and several decades of Marxist propaganda.

Nonwhites around the world, and especially in white countries, are also watching the unfolding drama with great excitement, growing bolder as white altruism reaches a crescendo and white resistance fails to materialize.

Of course, political leaders realized that you can’t just invite in a million starving beggars who differ profoundly in race, language, religion, and culture without disaster. All it would take is a simple misunderstanding to ignite a race war. Even in the best-case scenario, it would be impossible to feed, house, and educate them at a First-World level. They would quickly overwhelm society and bring it down to their level. These people are the refuse of India, not their best. Theft and murder would run amok. Starving people also bring epidemics.

Beyond that, it won’t stop with one fleet; if one fleet is welcomed, others will follow.

Allowing them to set out was a folly. They should have been promptly turned back. But no one would take responsibility for such a decision. They were too afraid of bad press and the scoldings of priests and women. Besides, when the fleet set out, it could have ended up anywhere, including at the bottom of the sea. Why would any political leader risk bad press warding off what will probably be other people’s problems?

When the fleet neared Europe, it should have been sunk. Yes, it would be a terrible loss of life—which India could, by the way, replace in a matter of days—but it would have prevented even worse horrors. Yet no one would take responsibility for such a decision, lest they be pilloried in the press and tried as criminals. And, again, why risk anything when the fleet might still be somebody else’s problem?

When the migrants arrived in Europe, they should not have been allowed to disembark freely. Instead, they should have been interned in remote camps to shield the native population from disease and crime. Yet no one would take responsibility for such a decision, for it would trigger neurotics by reminding them of the Nazis.

As the fleet entered the Mediterranean, Spain braced itself for invasion. But the fleet sailed on by, although they left behind a horrifying memento: the corpses of whites and Asians who had embarked with them. The Indians were rejecting all diversity and hardening themselves into a unified invasion force as they prepared to land in Europe. The fist was closing. Obviously a blow would fall. At this point there was no excuse not to treat the fleet as hostile and repel it with force.

When the fleet approached the French coast, trust in the system evaporated, and millions fled. While their lips paid homage to universal brotherhood, their feet carried them to safety. All of them asked, “Why won’t other people take a stand to protect our lives and property and civilization itself—and, of course, allow the Left to martyr them for doing the right thing?”

The measure of “progress” is the extent to which people can assume that virtue will not merely go unrewarded but will actively be punished—the extent to which they can assume that their neighbors will act from fear and selfishness rather than decency and solidarity. Such a society collapses at the first blow.

The white refugees were met along the way by a flood of people moving south to welcome the invaders: priests, hippies, motorcycle gangsters, escaped convicts, madmen, journalists . . . The traitors’ motives were a brew of ideology, egomania, hatred of their own, and nihilism. They expected to be greeted as saviors and rewarded as turncoats. But although some were raped and others were murdered, most were just brushed aside by the Ganges migrants as irrelevant. None of them got what they wanted, except those who wanted pure destruction.

Once the fleet landed and France descended into chaos, the government was overthrown by a Leftist junta. The new government then used the French military to suppress the resistance of the native French. France was finished as a white society. It became legal to rob Frenchmen and to rape French women.

Millions more Third Worlders swarmed into other European societies, which shared the same fate as France. The last holdout was Switzerland, where the chronicle we are reading has been written. But it too, like South Africa and Rhodesia, has finally succumbed to international pressure.

If whites do not find the will to stem the tide, future historians, no doubt Chinese, will debate why the white race allowed itself to be extinguished. Throughout the book, Raspail invites us to consider different explanations.

Why, on Raspail’s account, is the white race facing extermination? He doesn’t think it is a ghastly misunderstanding. He doesn’t think it is the accidental convergence of different forces. He thinks it is the product of conscious planning on the part of non-whites who hate whites and wish us to perish. If there is an element of accident or coincidence, it is only the meshing together of many independent anti-white conspiracies.

Why are we hated to the point of genocide? It is complicated, but whites are not just hated for our crimes, real and imagined, but also for our virtues. The beauty of our race and our creations; the power of our science, technologies, and armies; our wealthy, free, and orderly societies: all of these inevitably stir feelings of resentment and envy, the desire to take what we have—or, barring that, to make us lose it.

But this sort of evil has always existed. Surely, if we are powerful enough to stir such envy, we are also powerful enough to resist it. So how did the white man become a colossus with feet of clay? Why are we enabling our own genocide? The answer is a spiritual weakness that Raspail attributes primarily to Christianity and its moral offshoots, including secular liberalism and Leftism.

For convenience, I will call this spiritual weakness “white guilt.” White guilt means that whites are somehow responsible for the suffering of non-whites all over the world. To atone for this guilt, we must suffer in turn. We must give up everything that non-whites lack.

Christianity is the root of white guilt, because it teaches that humans can be collectively guilty for things that other people have done. Christianity undermines nationalism, ethnocentrism, and racism by proclaiming the brotherhood of mankind, thereby expanding our moral community and our moral obligations to the ends of the Earth. Christianity also inverts the natural order of values, preaching that those who lack are better than those who have. Want to overthrow society? Just make weakness sacred. Finally, Christianity preaches magical redemption by the imitation of Christ, namely suffering and self-sacrifice by the haves for the have-nots. Without nearly 2000 years of Christianity shaping white minds, the basic elements of white guilt would never have been plausible.

Raspail seems to be of two minds about Christianity. On the one hand, it is the major source of the moral rot that is destroying the West. Christians, especially clergy, are prominent among the worst traitors and the most useless defenders of the West. On the other hand, he regards Christianity as part of French history and identity and looks back with nostalgia on the times when its most destructive influences were held in check.

Christianity may provide all the necessary conditions for complete racial nihilism, but it also contains two ideas that block its full realization. First is the universality of original sin. If you take Christianity seriously, non-whites and their champions are no less depraved than white colonists and oppressors. Second, the final reckoning with evil is God’s work, which is deferred to the end of the world.

Secular liberal humanitarianism does away with both of these katechons. Original sin is replaced by the natural goodness of mankind, which allows us to believe that the more primitive or immature (viz., “natural”) a person is, the more innocent he is. It also allows the champions of the downtrodden to feel entirely righteous in prosecuting their cause. The removal of the final judgment allows the self-annointed and self-righteous to believe that they can conquer evil and return mankind to innocence within history. These views lead straight to the Left’s strange blend of sentimentalism and savagery.

Intellectually speaking, Marxism adds almost nothing to liberal humanitarianism, save perhaps the idea that white saviors should not be the only agents of global justice. Non-whites too should work for their own liberation, primarily through crime and parasitism, which whites should accept because we deserve it for our sins. But in terms of political organization, no force on Earth was better than Marxism at unleashing savagery and destruction.

During the Cold War, however, Marxism went underground in the West, penetrating educational, cultural, charitable, and political institutions and promoting the inclusion and upward mobility of “marginalized” groups: women, sexual minorities, and especially non-whites.

Raspail is masterful at chronicling how a network of churches and secular charities (what we today call “Non-Governmental Organizations,” or NGOs) worked to move non-whites into Europe by such means as promoting adoptions. The NGOs were also there to facilitate the sailing of the flotilla, even though it was an act of mass piracy.

Once the fleet was launched, the presses and pulpits of the white world sprang into action to welcome them and browbeat any resistance. One day, every child in every elementary school in France was made to write a report on the poor migrants and why they should be welcomed. The rest of the education system also promoted the same message in lock-step. Politicians, prelates, celebrities, and Nobel laureates competed with one another to get the most screen time and deliver the most fulsome welcomes. Perhaps the most nauseating claim was that the boatloads of emaciated Hindus were more than a million Christs coming to redeem the West from the sins of racism, colonialism, and cleanliness.

Readers of the The Camp of the Saints found the “Migrant Crisis” of 2015 eerily foreshadowed.

But, as the flotilla neared France, millions of people along the coast—probably almost every actual Frenchman—chose to flee. Most Frenchmen did not wish to destroy their nation, their civilization, and their people.

So how did it happen? If they simply refused to let it happen, it would not have happened. So why didn’t they refuse? Because they were of two minds about their survival. On the one hand, they desired to keep their own lives, families, property, homeland, and future. On the other hand, they felt that this was selfish, because n0n-whites have less, so their claim was stronger.

It was easy to profess such altruistic views toward non-whites when there was little danger of having to live by them. In fact, in modern society, professing racial altruism is in one’s self-interest. It is so lavishly rewarded that people compete to write ever larger checks that society can never cash.

When, however, the time to pay up loomed, three groups emerged. The first group consisted of those who believed in white guilt and would follow the logic of their ideas into the abyss. These were the people who rushed to the coast. The second and largest group consisted of those who rejected white guilt, or at least rejected its most destructive consequences, but feared to do so openly. These were the people who fled. The third and smallest group consisted of those who openly rejected white guilt root and branch. These were the people who fought, until the French government sent the military to destroy them—while turning a blind eye to murder, rape, and general delinquency, as long as they were committed by non-whites.

Readers of The Camp of the Saints find the two-tier, anti-white justice systems in Western countries quite familiar.

Why did the Leftist minority triumph over the vast majority? Because the Left was organized, the Right was impotent, and the vast majority lacked leadership. They were a panicked rabble, each looking out for himself. Such a rabble can only coalesce into a unified force if a figure with recognized leadership skills takes a stand and demands that others do so as well.

A well-meaning nobody can’t do it, because people will look at him and think, “I might follow him, but others won’t, and if others won’t, then I will step out of the crowd and be exposed and vulnerable. Better to just stay in the crowd.” It is safer as an individual. But if every individual does the same, then none of them are safe. They are all counting on someone else to save them, someone else to be brave, so they don’t have to.

But modern society does not breed and elevate natural leaders. Instead, it elevates celebrities. But nobody will follow pop stars, actors, or football players into battle.

How did the Left gain so much power? Basically, because the Right—the natural guardians of order—gave it away. The Right fell into the hands of unserious, anti-intellectual men who thought that power lies in arms and money, not in the ideas that guide their use. But, as the French discovered in The Camp of the Saints, their military was of no use when their men were too demoralized and mutinous to repel an unarmed invasion of starving beggars.

The Right foolishly allowed the Left to take over religious, cultural, and educational institutions as platforms to preach white guilt. To the Right, such ideas seemed at best high-minded and impracticable, at worst stupid, crazy, and evil. But never for a minute did they take them seriously and think that they might matter someday.

But what about intellectuals of the Right? Surely some men of the Right understood the importance of ideas and the true goals of the Left. Surely someone understood the magnitude of the crisis and what was necessary to avert it. Such men exist in The Camp of the Saints, just as they exist today. But in the novel, as in today’s world, such voices are marginalized and impoverished: driven out of academia, the churches, and the mainstream media and forced to beg for subsistence from equally marginalized patrons.

In The Camp of the Saints, the Right-wing intellectual is Jules Machefer, publisher of La Pensée Nationale, a tiny, ill-funded daily paper. As the migrant fleet approaches, the president of the republic himself tries to get Machefer to speak out. Yes, even the president—who could unleash nuclear weapons, if he so wished—is desperate for someone else to be brave so he doesn’t have to, an attitude that should immediately impeach any political leader. Large cash donations suddenly appear. But Machefer is too embittered and pessimistic to act. He thinks it is too little, too late. Maybe it is.

What could have halted this disaster, saving France and ultimately the whole white world? A leader brave and ruthless enough to do whatever it took to stop the fleet. The sooner the better. Simply sending warships to escort the fleet back to India would have prevented the crisis with little or no loss of life. The only cost would be enduring some squawking from priests and journalists.

When the fleet entered the Mediterranean, it was already clear that it was a hostile invasion force. It should simply have been sunk. If the military mutinied, the mutineers should have been stood against the wall and shot until the survivors complied. Interestingly, Raspail says nothing about mutiny when the Left orders the military to suppress the resistance of the native French. But the Left has leaders. The Right does not.

“World opinion,” of course, would execrate anyone who stopped the fleet. But in secret, most people would have been relieved. Democracy means giving the people what they really want, and when they are too weak or stupid to choose it for themselves, it sometimes takes a dictator to enact the people’s will. This is why most societies have constitutional measures to grant the chief executive broad emergency powers as well as immunity from prosecution for using them. Using such powers is simply a matter of will, which the Left has and the Right lacks. But will needs a moral sanction, which the ideology of white guilt denies.

What if an ungrateful world wishes to martyr the man who saved it? It would not be the first time. But whoever said that heroism was easy? Every soldier and statesman should be willing to lay down his life for the salvation of his people.

Again, this is ultimately a question of moral character. But modern society does not breed such men. Thus, the appearance of such a leader is basically a deus ex machina, a miracle, and no serious society should depend on miracles to survive. So it is worth asking: how could we prevent such a crisis from taking place to begin with?

Raspail is right: the ultimate cause of the crisis is moral. Thus it must be fought primarily on moral grounds. If we are to overthrow the false premises of white guilt, then we must defend these ideas instead:

• White people do not bear collective guilt for the acts of others. But collective pride in our race and nations is perfectly healthy and moral.

• We have obligations to other human beings. But our obligations to others are not equal. We owe more to people who are biologically and culturally close to us than to those who are biologically and culturally remote. Preferences for one’s own are natural, normal, and right. The political system most consistent with human biological and cultural diversity, as well as ingroup preferences, is nationalism for all nations, a world with borders.

• The classical rather than the Christian scale of values is correct. Merit is based on virtue, not need; strength, not weakness.

• We are not magically redeemed from fake guilt through suffering and self-sacrifice.

• Human beings are not naturally good or innocent. Human goodness is rare and requires cultivation. Nobody attains virtue merely by professing the right ideas or championing the people who lack.

• Suffering and weakness do not entitle you to victimize others.

If these views are widely accepted, white guilt will simply be inconceivable. But this is an immense task. Our enemies have a 2000-year head start. But that’s just an argument for getting started right away.

To overthrow white guilt is to elevate white pride and self-assertion in its place. A pro-white moral revolution would make a political revolution unnecessary. If white identity and interests become sacrosanct, then we need not tear down old institutions or found new ones. Instead, all existing institutions would simply become pro-white—universities, churches, the media, and every political party, Right, Left, and center—just as today all of these institutions are anti-white.

Of course, pursuing a long-term metapolitical strategy does not prevent us from seizing whatever political gains might present themselves in the short term. We must, of course, close our borders, eliminate all laws and treaties that promote migration, then begin mass remigration of non-whites. Moreover, whenever possible, the Right must destroy the institutions of the Left and replace them with pro-white institutions. Anti-white organizations must be shut down. Anti-whites must be purged from academia, the media, and all branches of government, and pro-whites must be put in their places. Churches should lose their tax-exempt status if they don’t crack down on Leftist clergy. They need to be reminded that their kingdom is not of this world.

Archimedes once said that if he had a lever and a place to stand, he could move the entire world. That’s our goal: nothing less than to change the course of world history. Our lever is pro-white ideas. The place we stand is our movement and its institutions. In the last half-century, both awareness of our ideas and the size and power of our movement have grown enormously, in part because of The Camp of the Saints. When white people win back our future, we will owe a great debt to Jean Raspail.

Counter-Currents, November 29, 2024

Now for your streaming or downloading pleasure.

Audio version here

French version here, Arabic version here, Russian version here.

I’ve got good news and bad news.

The good news is that everyone likes to get good news. It is easy to bring good news and easy to receive it.

The bad news is that nobody likes to get bad news. It is hard to bring bad news and hard to receive it. Receiving bad news is upsetting, which is why bringing bad news is difficult. Sometimes one has to deal with tears and anger.

But bad news is always more important than good news, because if something is going wrong you need to know. Bad news is not a problem. Bad news is one’s awareness of a problem. And no matter how bad a problem is, it is usually better to know than not know, because knowing about a problem is the first step towards fixing it. The only situation in which it might be better not to know is if a problem is insoluble, so that knowing about it simply adds to the problem rather than helps alleviate it.

Because bad news is upsetting, people often respond to it irrationally. Sometimes they would prefer not to know, even though you can’t solve problems you don’t know about. Sometimes they misplace their emotions. Instead of getting upset with the problem itself and seeking to solve it, they get upset with the bad news and seek to punish the bearer. But this is foolish, because society works best when information flows freely, and the most important information is bad news.

Because receiving bad news is upsetting and giving it is risky, dealing with bad news is a test of character. Those who receive bad news have to master their emotions, for if you dissolve into tears or explode into anger, you are making it more burdensome to bring you bad news in the future, which means that you might not receive news about a problem until it is too late to rectify it. Bringing bad news is also a test of character, because one always risks unpleasant personal consequences, but sometimes short-run personal risks are necessary to secure the greater good in the long run. But since the bearers of bad news are doing us all a favor, it is incumbent upon us to reduce the risks to the absolute minimum. This is why freedom of speech needs to be a right enshrined in the fundamental law of every land.

One does not need the right to freedom of speech to tell people what they want to hear. Freedom of speech is the freedom to tell people what they don’t want to hear — but need to hear anyway. A right to freedom of speech, moreover, is not necessary when one bears bad news to powerless people, for instance one’s children, one’s students, or one’s employees. After all, they can’t punish you for your good deed. We need the right to freedom of speech when we bear bad news to people who are more powerful than us — people who need bad news to make important decisions, and people who have the power to punish the bearers of bad news. But they can’t punish us if free speech is our right. Our rights trump their anger.

The two most important things for White Nationalists today are:

1. Breaking down the taboo against white identity politics, i.e., the idea that it is immoral for whites — and only whites — to take our own side in ethnic conflicts.

2. Maintaining our freedom of speech long enough to destroy that taboo.

White Nationalists are the bearers of bad news: that diversity is not a strength, but a source of alienation, conflict, and violence; that modern politics and morals have put our race on a path to extinction; and the only solution is to abandon liberalism, hedonistic individualism, globalization, and multiculturalism and bring back healthier, pro-white policies and values. We are changing people’s minds, and the establishment is powerless to change them back. Thus they are trying to censor us.

How can we deal with this threat?

In the short run, we need an internet Bill of Rights to protect dissidents from censorship and deplatforming. Beyond that, we need an across-the-board ban on politically-correct terms of service and employment, so we are free to dissent without threatening our livelihoods and social capital. If we can get such legislation in place, I am confident that we can win, and sooner rather than later. We will change so many minds that we will reach a tipping point. The taboo against white identity politics will melt away. Pro-white values will pervade the culture. Eventually we can mobilize enough support to overthrow the existing political establishment and replace it with a pro-white one.

But who told us that this would be safe and easy? White Nationalists are battling against the most all-encompassing soft-totalitarian system in history. It is a system bent on nothing short of the genocide of the white race, a goal so evil that when Plato and Aristotle drew up their lists of bad regimes, it was simply inconceivable. To overthrow this system, we might have to risk much more than our livelihoods. We might have to risk our very lives.

In the long run, though, we are probably going to win even if we don’t get an internet Bill of Rights. Censorship can slow us down, but it can’t really stop us. Already people are laying the foundations for a new internet that will be free of the choke points where censors perch. Thus, ultimately, the only way to prevent us from getting our message out online will be to shut down the web entirely. But the establishment cannot contemplate that, because the global political and economic system depends on the Internet.

The establishment — or at least the tiny stratum that is fully aware of the present threat of white identity politics — has the same relationship to the Internet as a junkie to his habit. He knows that it will kill him in the long run. But very few junkies overcome their addiction because they cannot bear the short term pain, even if it is the price of long-term survival.

Human beings might best be defined as the intermittently rational animal, and one of the most pervasive forms of irrationality is pursuing short-term self-indulgence at the expense of long-term well-being. This is how nations and individuals get into debt; this is how economic, demographic, and ecological crises arise. Fortunately for us, it is also how the system will fail to do the only thing that can stop the rise of White Nationalism — until it is too late.

So be of good cheer. If we continue to get out message out, we will win. And internet censorship cannot stop that process. It can only make it slower and more difficult.

Once we win, what should our attitude be toward free speech? Some White Nationalists see free speech as merely a means to take power. I wish to argue that free speech is something that we will want to keep after we win.

Freedom of speech is a value because we are all fallible and vulnerable. Fallibility means that we can make mistakes. We can have false or inadequate pictures of the world which can be improved upon. Vulnerability simply means that unforeseeable contingencies can upset our best laid plans. To overcome mistakes and misfortunes, we first need to know about them. That means that we need the freedom to be the bearers of bad news. We need freedom of speech, because it makes genuine intellectual and social progress possible.

A society that lacks the ability to change lacks the ability to preserve itself. But a society can’t change if it lacks the ability to communicate bad news to its leaders. This is why we should want to protect freedom of speech, even when we are the ones in power.

Why do people oppose freedom of speech? There are two main reasons.

First, some people think they already have the truth. This truth is, moreover, absolute: It is complete and not subject to revision. Any contrary position is, therefore, a falsehood. This is why religions in the Abrahamic tradition — including Marxism — have opposed freedom of speech. They claim to be absolutely true. Therefore, all other religions are false — or, at best, semblances of the truth — and must be suppressed.

Second, people with a vested interest in a given political and economic system don’t like criticism because it threatens their power and peace of mind.

Both views are irrational.

We all make mistakes. We all suffer misfortunes. But only some of us are destroyed by them. Others learn from them and overcome them. But, again, the first step to overcoming a problem is knowing that one has it.

One of the most powerful ideas of Plato’s Republic is that political regimes and personality types have analogous structures, so the city can throw light on the soul, and the soul can throw light on the city.

Years ago, I read a listicle on signs that your boss might be a narcissist. The item that made the strongest impression on me is: Narcissists tend to punish bearers of bad news.

Defining narcissism is a tricky thing, because we live in a society in which all manifestations of honor, especially male honor, have been pathologized as narcissism. There is nothing wrong with thinking well of yourself and demanding that others treat you with respect. There is nothing wrong with taking pleasure in praise for your achievements. There is nothing wrong with high self-esteem, as long as it is based on objective merits.

Narcissism is a problem, though, when one puts preserving a positive self-image ahead of positive self-actualization.

Everyone makes mistakes. The path to self-actualization requires that we acknowledge our mistakes, take responsibility for them, learn what we can from them, and then rise above them. The narcissist, however, seeks to preserve his positive self-image at all costs. So when confronted with his mistakes, he denies them and doubles down on them. Or he blames others for his mistakes. Or he goes on the attack, particularly against the bearer of bad news. Anything, really, to avoid taking responsibility and acknowledging that he might have some room to learn and grow.

Narcissists may be highly attractive people. They may have enormous potential. Unfortunately, they think they are perfect just the way they are, and such complacency is deadly to personal growth. So as time passes, you will notice that narcissists seldom actualize their potential. Instead, they come off as dilettantes with a smooth patter. Older narcissists also seem increasingly puerile when compared to their contemporaries.

Narcissists also have difficulty maintaining friendships. Friends tell you what you need to hear — even if it is painful. Flatterers tell you what you want to hear. Friends aid self-actualization because they will tell you bad news. Flatterers encourage complacency because they only tell you how wonderful you are. Friends threaten a narcissist’s positive self-image, whereas flatterers reinforce it.

Obviously it is disastrous to put narcissists into positions of power, because they end up making important decisions based on false or incomplete information fed to them by flatterers. It is no way to run a society.

Today’s censorious establishment is narcissism writ large.

By censoring and suppressing White Nationalist ideas, the establishment changes almost nothing. We like to flatter ourselves that the White Nationalist movement is the driving force behind the rise of white racial consciousness. Our enemies share the same illusion. But the main forces behind the rise of White Nationalism are the moral outrages and catastrophic consequences of multiculturalism and white dispossession. People are coming to us in droves less because our movement is pulling them than because the system is pushing them. Which means that white racial consciousness would continue to rise even if White Nationalists were completely silenced.

Our anti-white oppressors, of course, do not see it that way, for that would threaten their positive self-image. The rise of white identity politics cannot be their fault. So it has to be our fault. They think white identity politics only exists because silver-tongued deceivers like Jared Taylor and Millennial Woes have Twitter accounts. Which is why they conclude that censorship will actually stop us. But White Nationalists are not the cause of ethnic conflict. We are just the bearers of bad news — and advocates of a workable alternative.

Censoring White Nationalists online does not stop people from noticing things, drawing conclusions, and formulating dissenting thoughts. It does not prevent people from discretely communicating their thoughts face to face or organizing in the real world. All censorship does is render the full extent of dissent invisible. This makes it difficult for the establishment to make rational political decisions. Censorship does not make the system stronger; it only makes it blinder, brittler, and more vulnerable. Advocates of censorship are like people who remove the battery from their smoke detector because they are tired of false alarms. But when the house catches fire, you need to know sooner than later.

If I were running a society, I would like to know who the dissidents are and what they think. So I would make freedom of speech a fundamental political right. If the dissidents are right, we can learn from them. If they are wrong, we can instruct them. If they are dangerously and stubbornly wrong, we can keep an eye on them.

But if we win, are we really going to give our enemies the freedom to regroup and rebrand, then lead our people back down the road to extinction once more? Don’t we want to shut their dirty, lying mouths forever?

There are two points here.

First, if we do come to power, we will have to purge the existing institutions. We will not leave wealth, influence, and political power in the hands of implacable enemies. We will take away their platforms in politics, the media, and the academy. We will just give them early retirements and a lifetime ban on addressing the public. Then we will fill their positions with people who are loyal to us. But that is a far cry from instituting a regime of intellectual censorship.

Second, even if there is a great purge of the existing system, no matter what kind of society you have, in every generation, there will be aberrant personalities who are drawn to ideas that threaten social order. The best way of preventing bad ideas and institutional subversion from taking root again is not to create a world where people have never heard of such things. Instead, we need to create a world where everyone has heard of them. A proper education imparts sound information as well as healthy values and tastes. Such an education will inoculate us against bad ideas. We don’t have to censor bad ideas if we are immune to them.

Evil will always be with us. But we need not fear it if we are immune to its charms. We should keep evil around, but keep it powerless, as a kind of memento mori, a death’s head at the feast, so we have a constant reminder of the hell on earth we will vanquish — but only if we start using, and defending, our freedom of speech today.

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2018/11/freedom-of-speech/

America lost the Iran War on the first day.

Pyrrhus of Epirus was one of the greatest generals of the ancient world. In 279 BCE, Pyrrhus defeated the Romans in the Battle of Asculum in Southern Italy. But the battle was so costly to Pyrrhus that he remarked that one more such “victory” would ruin him. This is the origin of the term “Pyrrhic victory,” meaning a victory that is really a defeat.

The lesson here is that the real victor is not the one who prevails on the battlefield but rather whoever gains power from the fight. By that standard, some battles have no victors. By that standard, the United States lost the Iran War on the first day.

The greater part of military power is bluff, i.e., the power to intimidate others into compliance without drawing one’s sword.

For more than half a century, the United States built an archipelago of military bases in the Middle East offering protection to the Gulf monarchies. In exchange for what? The US doesn’t import oil or gas from the Gulf, although, as we are all learning, Gulf exports still affect prices in America. The quid pro quo for American protection is the “petrodollar.”

Even though the US doesn’t buy oil in the Gulf, purchases are still paid for in US dollars. Thus importers like Japan must first purchase US dollars, which the Gulf states then use to buy US Treasury securities and other dollar-denominated assets, effectively financing US borrowing at lower interest rates.

The petrodollar system allows the US to run massive budget and trade deficits and create credit by ensuring a consistent, global demand for dollars. Without the constant stream of petrodollars washing back into the US, the Treasury would have to pay higher interest rates to service America’s immense national debt. Basically, the petrodollar system is keeping the US government solvent.

But the protection America offered the Gulf states was all a bluff. And Iran has now called it.

We had ample warning that a war on Iran might be disastrous for the American empire and the petrodollar in particular:

• Iran warned the United States that an Israeli-American attack would trigger retaliation against the Gulf states.

• Iran also warned us that it would close the Strait of Hormuz, shutting off the Gulf’s oil, gas, and other exports.

• We knew that Iran was committed to asymmetrical warfare strategies to counter America’s vastly larger and more expensive military. We had four years to learn about drone warfare in Ukraine. Just last year, we saw Iran and its allies exhausting Israeli defenses with missile barrages.

Those warnings were ignored.

Iran has now destroyed America’s military bases and radar installations in the Gulf states. The United States has also sent ordinance to intercept missiles and drones from the Gulf states to Israel, because Israel First.

Beyond that, Iran has proved to the Gulf States that it can completely destroy their economies and—by striking their desalinization plants—render them uninhabitable. In short, Iran can send the sheiks back to the camel age—and America won’t protect them.

Since the war started, however, Iran has increased its oil exports by more than 25%, and the price of oil has more than doubled. Tankers filled with Iranian oil are safely transiting the Strait of Hormuz. In short, the United States has given Iran billions by starting this war. Moreover, the US can’t really afford to stop Iran’s exports, because that would drive global prices even higher. In fact, the US has desanctioned Iranian oil to cut prices. The US may even be buying Iranian oil, i.e., paying for more of the drones and missiles that have killed American soldiers.

What’s more, Iran is allowing other tankers to leave the Gulf, provided they pay a toll to Iran and their cargoes are not purchased in dollars. Once this war is over and their own export industries are back online, the Gulf states are going to be asking themselves why they are taking petrodollars again if they aren’t getting any quid for their quo. But without the petrodollar, America will take giant strides toward outright insolvency.

So let’s take stock. Even if the United States totally wrecks Iran on the battlefield and Trump declares victory, will the United States be stronger and more secure?

• The global economy is wrecked.

• There will be famine in the Third World.

• More migrants and refugees will be heading to Europe.

• The Pax Americana may be wrecked. I hate the American empire, and in the long run, it needs to be wound down. But in the short run, we will start missing it when conflicts start popping up in places you’ve never heard of. Beyond that, there are other things I want to do first, and I would prefer to carefully and deliberately disengage from empire, not see it simply collapse.

• The petrodollar may be wrecked. It’s a fundamentally unjust system that needs to be replaced, but in the meantime, there will be a lot of suffering. Again, America has more pressing problems, and I would rather wind the petrodollar down deliberately, not see it simply collapse.

• Worst of all, the Left will almost surely return to power in the United States, which means that what’s left of Trump’s positive achievements—closed borders, deportations, rolling back anti-white initiatives—will be reversed.

So no, America won’t be stronger and more secure because of this war. We lost. We lost on the first day. Because the only way to have won this war was not to start it.

Moreover, this outcome was entirely predictable. There were people in the Pentagon, even in the White House, who knew better. So why did the war happen?

The simple answer is that this war was never about benefiting the United States. It never would have happened if we put America First. It was all about benefiting Israel, at the expense of America and the rest of the world. This is so obvious that even the New York Times is reporting it.

According to polling by the Anti-Defamation League, Jews know their power in America is declining. Their supporters are disproportionately Baby Boomers, who are entering their 80s and beginning to die off. Thus Netanyahu and company were in a rush to squeeze one last war out of America, before they discard the dry husk.

So who are the winners of the Iran War?

• Israel is being wrecked by Iranian retaliation, but they are counting on everything being rebuilt at US expense, and they also have a rather low threshold for winning this war. For America to feel good about this war, we had to see Iran turned into a liberal democracy. Israel merely wants to see Iran wrecked, like Iraq and Syria. That’s easy to achieve. If Israel is merely less wrecked than Iran, they will be relatively more powerful and secure.

• Russia is winning because oil and gas prices are rising, export sanctions are being abandoned, and materiel that could be helping Ukraine is being diverted to the Iran War.

• China is the biggest winner. Since China is America’s main global rival, they grow stronger and more secure simply by doing nothing while America squanders its wealth and power in the Gulf. When all this is over, China will appear to be a far more reliable ally and trading partner.

Frankly, Trump seems to have gone mad. Still, he has enough sense to realize the mess he’s in. But he doesn’t see any way out. Israel will continue to escalate the war until someone in Washington has the courage to say “no,” which will probably require removing Netanyahu from power.

Absent that, Trump must simply hope and pray, hence his frantic lies and improvisations.

What’s he counting on? He can’t bankrupt his way out of this problem.

Trump is 79 years old. Like every other spendthrift of his generation, he probably consoles himself with the thought that he’ll be dead before America will face the full consequences of his folly.

In the meantime, he’s posting about imaginary negotiations to manipulate the stock and commodity markets, while his Jewish friends make billions from the volatility.

Basically, he’s joined in the looting.

I’ve given up hoping that we are ruled by people who care about America’s future. But if there is anyone in the White House who at least cares about his own future, Trump needs to be removed from power.

They’d better do it quickly, too. Preferably before Trump turns American ground troops into Iranian drone fodder. Since maintaining a positive self-image is the overriding goal of every narcissist, Trump will start scapegoating the people around him as matters get worse. At a certain point, it will come down to “Trump or us.”

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2026/03/america-has-already-lost-the-iran-war/

I want to thank Fróði Midjord and the rest of the Scandza team for making this event possible, as well as all of you for coming out to hear me. I am honored today to be speaking alongside these distinguished doctors of the human sciences.

My Ph.D., however, is in philosophy. Philosophers don’t do scientific research. Instead, we stand back and try to talk about the big picture, including the meaning of scientific discoveries for politics and morals. My topic today is “The Very Idea of White Privilege.”

A privilege is an advantage that you enjoy and others don’t. Privilege is inherently unequal. Special privileges are the opposite of equal rights. White privilege means advantages enjoyed by whites just in virtue of their race — rights not enjoyed by non-whites. White privilege is a form of hereditary privilege. Whites do nothing to earn or merit white privilege over and above simply being born. White privilege thus refers to a whole range of unequal and unearned — and thus unjust — advantages enjoyed by whites and denied to non-whites in the societies that whites created. White privilege is just another word for white “racism.”

The concept of white privilege has exploded in American public discourse in the last five years, coinciding with the so-called “great awokening,” the wave of Left-wing hysteria and gaslighting set off by the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown hoaxes, namely the claims that two blacks who were killed while committing crimes were actually the real victims, innocent victims of white racism.

The concept of white privilege has provoked a great deal of eye-rolling and healthy anger from whites. This manifestation of white toughness has, absurdly, been termed “white fragility,” which is a clear sign that the Left is not just out of touch with reality but simply thinks that it can be conjured up or banished with magic words.

Whites reject the idea of white privilege for various reasons.

• Some think that racism is a terrible thing, but they don’t think that they or their societies are guilty of it.

• The vast majority of white people work very hard and never had anything given to them, so they resent the idea that they benefit from unearned privileges.

• Others think there is nothing wrong with racial inequality and believe that white privilege is just another politically correct moral swindle in which non-whites seek unearned advantages by accusing good-hearted whites of spurious offenses for which they can buy forgiveness.

But as much as I applaud this pushback against white privilege, the concept is not entirely meaningless. For instance, within the lifetimes of some people present today, whites enjoyed legal privileges denied to non-whites in Apartheid South Africa and the American South.

But there is not a white society in the world today in which whites enjoy such legal privileges over non-whites. Even the idea of nationality through descent is being chipped away as a form of privilege. Indeed, in South Africa and the United States, non-whites now enjoy privileges over whites, both legally and through massive private discrimination.

Yet, even with decades of official and unofficial non-white privilege behind us, certain non-white groups are more likely than whites to be uneducated, poor, and in trouble with the law — to name just three important factors in overall social well-being.

The official explanation for these lingering inequalities is “racism,” that is to say: white malevolence, as well as “systemic” forms of inequality. According to this theory, since all people want to thrive in white societies and have equal inherent potential to do so, the fact that some groups conspicuously do not thrive needs to be explained.

Since white people are the architects of these societies, we are obviously the ones to blame. Thus white people must be hectored and browbeaten and reeducated. We must be punished by affirmative action and reparations. And we must endure having our societies torn apart and rebuilt over and over again, until racial equality is attained. Because nothing stands in the way of racial equality except white institutions and ways of life, white ignorance and ill-will, white guilt and white privilege — or so they say.

But it is increasingly difficult to believe this viewpoint because white legal privileges have been overturned. White privilege has not, moreover, been replaced by a classical liberal meritocracy, in which all people are subject to the same rules and judged on individual merit, but by a system of non-white privilege. But even with the system rigged in their favor, some non-white groups conspicuously lag behind whites in a vast number of indexes of social well-being. [1]

Even though anti-racist activists and non-whites find it increasingly difficult to point to any specific cause of persistent inequality, they just know that it is somehow white people’s fault. This is why the Left has resorted to increasingly “occult” — i.e. hidden and mysterious — explanations for persistent racial inequality.

Since fewer and fewer whites are consciously racist, the problem must be unconscious racism somehow keeping certain groups down. Unconscious racism is a real phenomenon, but how far does it explain persistent inequality? [2]

Since fewer and fewer whites hold negative racial stereotypes about other groups, yet non-whites still display stereotypical behavior, non-whites must be sabotaging themselves because of the “threat” — the mere specter — of negative stereotypes existing in their own minds. And this is still white people’s fault, somehow.

Since explicit, legal racism has been dismantled and even reversed, the legacy of past racism must still exert a subtle influence that is powerful enough to cancel out the effects of much more recent systems of non-white privilege, somehow.

The classic statement on white privilege is Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” where she writes:

I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks. [3]

McIntosh offers fifty examples of white privilege. McIntosh’s backpack is more of a grab bag, ranging from discrimination in housing and law enforcement to the color of band-aids. McIntosh’s examples make it very clear that when she speaks of non-white Americans she is thinking specifically of black Americans.

Most of McIntosh’s white privileges fall into two broad categories: (1) aspects of having a homeland, and (2) not being black. Aspects of having a homeland include:

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.

14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

16. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their race.

23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge,” I will be facing a person of my race.

26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.

27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.

46. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin.

All of these “privileges” are simply aspects of having a homogeneous homeland, of belonging to a community of people with whom you share a common biological and cultural heritage. In white societies, one can call this “white privilege.” But in Asian societies, one would call it “Asian privilege” and in African societies, “African privilege.” Furthermore, it is too crude to speak about privilege simply in terms of broad racial categories. Instead, we should speak about Norwegian privilege in Norway, Japanese privilege in Japan, Swazi privilege in Swaziland, and the like. It would also be nice to live in a world in which stateless peoples, like Palestinians and Kurds, have similar privileges.

McIntosh describes privilege as “invisible” and “weightless.” We are “oblivious” of privilege. The unconscious aspect of privilege is also an aspect of having a homeland. A homeland is not just a realm in space. It is also a realm of meaning. To be truly at home, one must fully internalize and master these codes of meaning — language and manners being the most important — so one does not have to consciously reflect on them. Then one can simply relax and live rather than be self-conscious.

A foreign land is not just a place with unfamiliar people and things. The conventions are unfamiliar as well, thus one is constantly forced to reflect upon things that are taken for granted by the natives. Is this the right word? Is this the right greeting? How do I call 911?

It is fun to visit foreign lands, but it can be alienating, stressful, and psychologically exhausting to actually live in one, and this is the everyday experience of minorities and stateless peoples in other people’s homelands. The cure to this problem is to give every people a land of their own where they can feel at home rather than constantly alienated.

Many of McIntosh’s alleged privileges of being white are more accurately described as the absence of the disadvantages of being black. These include:

3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

13. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

18. I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.

35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.

36. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.

38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative, or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.

39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.

40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.

McIntosh describes black disadvantages as white privileges because she wishes to absolve blacks for these problems and blame whites. Unfortunately, many anti-black stereotypes — for instance, black criminality and financial irresponsibility — are not just dreamed up by evil-minded white people. They are based in experience.

Of course most blacks are not criminals and spendthrifts, but enough of them are that it is rational for whites to be vigilant around blacks they do not know, a burden of suspicion that falls equally upon the problem minority and the blameless majority.

It really is an injustice. But it is also rational. Thus whites should not feel guilty about it. Such rational distrust is an inevitable product of diversity, and it will only increase as our societies become more multicultural. The Left’s only response to the rational distrust generated by diversity is to morally shame whites into dropping their guard, making them more vulnerable to predators and parasites.

One of the central contentions of the Black Lives Matter movement is that blacks are arrested for crimes at a greater rate than whites simply because of white racism. But objective data show that blacks are arrested for crimes at pretty much the same rate that they commit them. [4] Thus, if Black Lives Matter wishes to lower the black arrest rate, they should work to lower the black crime rate.

But there is not a single politician in America who has the courage to simply tell blacks to commit fewer crimes. Instead, police departments are being intimidated into giving blacks license to break the law with impunity. Police are also more likely to use violence with white suspects than blacks in comparable situations. This is objectively a system of black privilege. [5]

Blacks feel oppressed in white societies by negative white stereotypes. But the most momentous of these stereotypes are based in experience. Thus it is rational to use them as guides in dealing with black strangers. Because of this, no amount of reeducation is going to banish them. [6]

As long as multiracial societies persist, whites will continue to resent blacks for not living up to white standards, and blacks will continue to resent whites for imposing alien standards. The ethnonationalist solution to such irreconcilable differences is racial divorce: the creation of homogeneous sovereign homelands, to the extent that this is possible, for all distinct peoples who wish to exercise this right.

The main reason to reject the claim that America is a white supremacist society is the fact that some non-white groups — chiefly East Asians and certain communities of South Asians — do better than whites in key indicators of success, such as educational attainment, income, and law abidingness, and they did so before anti-white discrimination and non-white tokenism became rampant. If American whites were intent on creating systematic white privilege and supremacy, we failed miserably. Therefore, white racism is not a sufficient explanation for differing racial outcomes in America.

We have an alternative hypothesis based on the science of Human Biological Diversity. The differing levels of education, income, and law-abidingness — to name just three factors — among racial groups in America are precisely what we would predict given measurable differences of IQ and sociopathic personality traits between the races. For a survey of the effect of IQ on a wide range of social outcomes, see Richard Lynn’s The Global Bell Curve. On racial differences in personality traits beyond just IQ, including psychopathy, see Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters. [7]

This does not mean that the American system is “fair” in the sense of being a color-blind meritocracy. We are perfectly willing to admit that some forms of discrimination favor whites — if it is also acknowledged that significant non-white privileges exist. But I believe that Human Biological Diversity is so powerful a determinant of social outcomes that it can basically overpower both white and anti-white privileges, allowing us to act as if these forces do not exist, even though we know that they do. In a similar way, although we know that other measurable psychological traits matter to social outcomes, IQ differences alone are so powerful at predicting social outcomes that we can act as if other factors do not exist. (This was brought home to me by Lynn’s The Global Bell Curve.)

Different races really are different. That means that when different races live in the same social system, subject to the same laws, institutions, and incentives, some will inevitably flourish better than others. There will never be a social system that is equally conducive to the flourishing of all races and cultures. Such inequalities will persist even if we institute remedial forms of discrimination in favor of groups who lag behind. The science of Human Biological Diversity also explains why some non-white groups excel in white societies, even though they too have trouble finding flesh-colored band-aids.

Many of us would prefer not to mention biological racial differences at all, for fear of hurting the feelings of disadvantaged groups. But we have to talk about such differences, because the present system blames whites for the failure of some non-whites to flourish in white societies. As long as whites are charged with evil intentions to keep some races down, and as long as white institutions and ways of life are targeted for demolition and reconstruction by egalitarian social engineers, we must press the alternative hypothesis of biologically based inequality.

So if the different races are biologically unequal, what does this imply for social policy? Today’s conservatives and libertarians think they can retain multiculturalism by establishing a true “color-blind” meritocracy. While I am all for meritocracy, it is simply naïve to believe that groups that will naturally gravitate toward the bottom of such a system — the “losers” — will be satisfied with their lot, even if they arrived there by entirely “fair” procedures, and even if they enjoy higher material standards of living than they could in non-white homelands.

Classical liberalism is simply blind to non-material motivations like honor and pride. Many non-whites would rather rule in hell (their own homelands) than serve in heaven (classical liberal meritocracies). Ethnonationalists, however, understand completely.

Every human being deserves a home, where he can be himself free of the interference of others. But we should feel at home outside our front doors as well. We should be able to live among people who share our language and values, our history and destiny, the whole litany of “white privileges.” We don’t just need homes. We need homelands. Not alienating, bewildering, multicultural bazaars filled with people who do not share our language and values. A country’s Gross Domestic Product does not matter if nobody feels at home.

If races really are different, that means they will create different social systems. These systems will express their natures. They will feel as comfortable to them as well-fitting shoes. But this means that other races will not feel comfortable, even if they are treated with utmost courtesy and fairness — even if they are given advantages over the natives. The solution is not to further change our societies, to further abandon our norms and ways of life to accommodate outsiders. That simply doesn’t work. Multiculturalism does not create societies where everyone feels at home. It creates societies where no one feels at home.

There is no moral imperative to destroy our homelands to accommodate strangers. There would be no such imperative even if it were possible. And there is certainly no imperative to destroy real homelands in pursuit of the impossible dream of a society in which all peoples feel equally at home.

But there is one place where all the peoples of the world can feel at home. It is called the planet Earth. This planet is big enough for all races and nations to have places they can call their own. This is the ethnonationalist version of utopia. Privilege is inherently unequal. But everyone can be privileged in his own homeland. Norwegians can be privileged in Norway. Somalis can be privileged in Somalia. Kurds can be privileged in Kurdistan. As long as every people has a place to call home, there is nothing unfair about this situation.

Peggy McIntosh describes white privilege as a package of “unearned assets.” That is meant as a criticism. But we must be careful here. Only a bourgeois individualist equates the unearned with the unjust. There are some cases where we have a right to unearned assets. For instance, if a gift truly is a gift, and not simply a disguised form of exchange, then it is an unearned asset to which we have a right. A gift created by past generations and handed on to future generations cannot be a disguised exchange, for there is no way to pay our ancestors back for our genetic and cultural heritage. We can only pay it forward, to future generations. A homeland is an unearned asset, a privilege, and you have every right to defend it zealously.

Norway is not something that all people can enjoy. It is something for yourselves and your posterity. It was created by your ancestors, carved out of a remarkably harsh environment through will and ingenuity. It was passed on to you, for safekeeping and improvement. And I hope you will pass it along to future generations once strangers like me have left your shores.

Notes

[1] An excellent summation of these differences is Richard Lynn’s The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide (Augusta, Ga.: Washington Summit Publishers, 2008).

[2] On unconscious racism, see Kevin MacDonald’s “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 4 (2006).

[3] Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace & Freedom Magazine (July/August 1989), pp. 10–12.

[4] See for instance, Edwin S. Rubenstein’s The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America (Oakton, Vir.: New Century Foundation, 2016).

[5] On Black Lives Matter and the collapse of policing blacks, see Heather Mac Donald’s many studies on “the Ferguson effect.” On the over-policing of whites in America, including increased chances of death by cop, see Richard Houck’s “Law Enforcement and the Hostile Elite,” Counter-Currents, June 20, 2018.

[6] For a more detailed discussion of the rationality of experience-based prejudices, see my essay “In Defense of Prejudice,” in In Defense of Prejudice and It’s Okay to Be White.

[7] Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters (Oakton, Vir.: New Century Books, 2016).

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2019/11/the-very-idea-of-white-privilege/

The Left characterizes the United States and other white countries around the world as systems of “white supremacy” and “white privilege.”

White Nationalists claim that the United States and most other white countries are committed to “white genocide”: the “great replacement” of whites by nonwhites, which is the predictable consequence of political decisions to promote sub-replacement white fertility, race-mixing, and race-replacement immigration.

Which of these diametrically opposed positions is true?

There’s an easy way to find out. In a white supremacist society, you should be able to declare that “It’s okay to be white” without controversy or consequences.

Indeed, in a white supremacist society, the only criticism you might receive is for being too tepid. After all, “okay” simply means “adequate but not especially good.” It is the equivalent to giving white existence a grade of “C.” Being white is apparently nothing to envy, but you wouldn’t kill yourself over it either.

When the slogan “It’s okay to be white” first appeared on 4chan’s /pol/ in 2017, it was promoted as a diagnostic tool to help convince “normies” that we live under anti-white regimes. After all, how could anyone object to “It’s okay to be white”?

The slogan does not claim that being white is great. It does not claim that being white is better. It merely says that being white is okay, which is the faintest possible praise. Furthermore, “It’s okay to be white” says nothing at all about other races. It certainly doesn’t denigrate them.

So on what grounds could one object to saying “It’s okay to be white”? As Tucker Carlson put it, “What’s the correct position? That it’s not okay to be white?”

If multiculturalism is truly an ideology of equality and inclusion, then multiculturalists should have no problem saying “It’s okay to be white.” They would grant it the same status as “Black is beautiful” and “It’s okay to be different.” Indeed, whiteness is one form of difference.

Clearly, one could object to a statement as innocuous as “It’s okay to be white” only if one really has something against white people, specifically a deep hatred or prejudice. This is why it is such a useful diagnostic tool.

“It’s okay to be white” flyers and stickers were posted widely in the United States and other white countries, primarily in the Anglosphere. As its creators predicted, the slogan provoked an immediate and intense backlash, far out of proportion to the inoffensive message.

Upon seeing “It’s okay to be white” signs and stickers, the first reaction of hundreds of people was to call the police. This can be verified simply by entering the words “police” and “It’s okay to be white” in the search engine of your choice. (DuckDuckGo gives the best results.) This happened even in the United States, where the First Amendment to the US Constitution protects freedom of speech. Here are a couple of my favorite headlines:

• “Sickening to Know People Think Like This” – Police Investigate “It’s Okay to Be White” Signs in Scotland

• 150+ Cases of Outrage, Manhunts over “It’s OK to be White,” Poster Activist Responds

Indeed, sometimes people deemed these posters too hot for the local cops to handle, so the Federal Bureau of Investigation was called in:

• FBI probes signs defending white privilege found at Vermont universities

To put this in context, ask yourself how many flyers and stickers you see in a typical day. Dozens? On a university campus, you might see hundreds. Then ask yourself how many times you were tempted to call the police. Most people would have to answer: never. But when hundreds of people saw “It’s okay to be white,” they were convinced that it is illegal—or that it should be.

Once the police were called, of course the press were alerted, and locals were asked to share their opinions about the flyers. Most people interviewed are certain that “It’s okay to be white” constitutes “hate speech,” even though it says nothing negative or hateful about anyone.

I’ll pull quotes from just one article to give a sense of the sort of statements that are typical: John Swinney, Deputy First Minister of the Scottish Government, declared: “This is atrocious and has no place in Perth or any other part of our country. We must stand together to resist this unacceptable material.” Peter Barrett, a Perth councilor, said: “This is despicable hate speech. It is covert racism disguising white supremacist views. People should be in no doubt this is no innocuous joke.” Local antiracists claimed that people of color had called to share their feelings. The “terrifying attitudes” expressed by “It’s okay to be white” made them feel “sickened,” “disgusted,” and “unsafe.”

My favorite political statement comes from Mayor William Dickinson, Jr. of Wallingford, Connecticut: “whoever posted the signs reading ‘It’s okay to be white’ don’t speak for the people of Wallingford,” he declared, speaking for the people of Wallingford.

Given that higher education is a citadel of the extreme Left throughout the white world, reactions to “It’s okay to be white” on university campuses are especially extreme, as one can see by typing the phrase plus the word “campus” into any search engine. Here are my favorite headlines:

• “It’s OK to Be White” Flyers Lead to Promise of “Severest Disciplinary Action” by Western Conn. State U.

• Ohio universities involve FBI in investigation of “It’s okay to be white” and white nationalist group’s postings on campus

• Oklahoma law school student is questioned by FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and expelled for posting “It’s Okay to be White” flyers on campus

Naturally, university administrators—especially in Podunk schools—can be counted on for the most vehement denunciations of “It’s okay to be white.” The fulminations of President John Clark of Western Connecticut State University are typical: “I want to state directly and without equivocation that if any member of our university community is found to be party to these revolting actions they will be subject to the severest disciplinary actions, including dismissal as well as possible civil and criminal actions.” These are not empty threats. A student at Oklahoma City University School of Law was expelled for posting “It’s okay to be white” and ended up talking to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

My favorite “It’s okay to be white” story is from Australia (75% white), where Senator Pauline Hanson of the nationalist One Nation Party proposed a non-binding statement condemning anti-white racism and declaring “It’s okay to be white.” Although politicians constantly append their names to all manner of high-minded but empty proclamations, and although not a single Senator in Australia should have had a problem with affirming that “It’s okay to be white,” the resolution was narrowly defeated on October 15, 2018.

Is any of this behavior consistent with the claim that the United States and other white countries are systems of “white supremacism” and “white privilege”? Obviously not. If we lived in a white supremacist system, people would be afraid to call the police about “It’s okay to be white” flyers and stickers. College administrators would be afraid to threaten students with punishment. Legislators would be afraid to vote against “It’s okay to be white.” But instead, they know that the entire establishment—political, business, media, and academic—is anti-white. Thus it will approve of their behavior and give them a pat on the head.

But just how anti-white is this system? Is it really committed to white genocide? One can interpret “It’s okay to be white” in at least two ways. The most natural reading is “It’s good to be white.” But the word “okay” is such tepid praise that maybe we should interpret the phrase more along these lines: “It is acceptable to be white,” or better, “It is acceptable for white people to be—to exist,” or “Don’t kill yourself over being white.”

A society in which one can be punished for merely asserting that “It is acceptable for white people to exist” is obviously hostile to the very existence of whites. It is a society in which it is unacceptable for white people to exist. But if this is true, wouldn’t it be natural to explore ways of getting rid of whites altogether? The genocidal implications are obvious.

One might counter that those who object to “It’s okay to be white” do not object to the existence of white people but merely to white pride and white self-assertion. Of course, “It’s okay to be white” is not a statement of pride and self-assertion. It is absurdly unassuming, almost an apology for existing. But even that is apparently too much self-worth for the preachers of “white guilt” and self-abnegation.

However, even the ideology of “white guilt” is implicitly genocidal. First of all, there is no path to absolution from white guilt. As long as non-whites are unequal to whites, whites will somehow be held guilty. And because inequality is natural, it will always exist. Second, we live in a world of racial strife, and a race without pride or self-assertiveness—a race burdened with eternal guilt and self-reproach—will fall prey to races without such handicaps.

The best-case scenario is that whites will forever be poisoned with spurious guilt for the inadequacies of others, then milked for free stuff. In short: slavery. The worst-case scenario is outright genocide. And given that violence and instability increase with diversity, orderly factory-farm slavery is the least likely outcome. Thus objecting to white pride—or even mere white “okayness”—is ultimately objecting to white existence as such.

Do the people who object to “It’s okay to be white” consciously promote white genocide, or do they know not what they do? Most of them don’t know what they are doing. White genocide is the long-term result of the principles they act on, but most people don’t think about the long-term. They unwittingly promote white genocide while thinking they are being moral, pragmatic, or even selfish, because they know that they will be rewarded for anti-white signaling.

The great value of “It’s okay to be white” is that when one attacks such banal pro-white sentiments, it brings the implicitly genocidal programming of the Left very close to the surface. If you get hysterical about white people merely existing and not feeling suicidal about it, what do you really stand for anyway?

Of course, the real point of “It’s okay to be white” is not to save the souls of anti-whites but to educate ordinary people. This is why we need to keep “It’s okay to be white” constantly in the news. The same is true with “All Lives Matter,” which can get you killed. More to the point is “White Lives Matter,” which can get you fired.

Force the Left to say “It’s not okay to be white.” Force them to say “White lives don’t matter.” And make sure that everyone knows it. Also, be sure to take down names. If a doctor, lawyer, professor, or politician does not think it is okay to be white, then how can he be trusted to serve the interests of whites? White racists are routinely fired on the assumption that they cannot deal professionally with non-whites. Anti-white racists need to be held to the same standard. A white person would have to be nuts to go under the knife of a surgeon who says “White lives don’t matter.” We would be foolish to expect anti-white professors to grade us justly. Whites must be protected from such people. It is our job to hold institutions accountable.

When the entire establishment comes together to denounce “It’s okay to be white” or “White lives matter,” it decisively refutes the Left’s thesis that we live in systems of white supremacism and privilege. It also exposes that multiculturalism does not envision a world in which whites enjoy equality and harmony with other groups.

The multiculturalist utopia does not envision whites at all.

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2020/07/its-okay-to-be-white-2/

Now for your streaming and downloading pleasure.

White Nationalism is all about giving white people a future again. Whites today face a momentous decision. In every white homeland, trends toward below-replacement fertility, mixed marriages, and open borders mean that, first, we will lose political power in our own homelands, and then, sometime later, we will cease to exist as a distinct race. If these trends are not reversed, the white race will simply go extinct, but only after suffering all the horrors and indignities of being a conquered people.

There are two kinds of extinction: natural, like the dinosaurs, and man-made, like the passenger pigeon. White extinction is man-made. It is the predictable outcome of trends set in motion by bad political decisions. Thus, white extinction can be stopped by better political decisions.

Unfortunately, there are millions of people, most of them white, who will fight tooth and claw to stop us. But there are not even 300 people in this room. Given the magnitude of what is at stake, AmRen conferences should be held in sold-out stadiums.

But if we win, our descendants will look back on those who turned the tide as heroes akin to Leonidas and his brave 300, only immensely greater, because so much more is at stake: not the future of a single people but of our whole race.

Yes, we have made tremendous progress in recent years. I have had a front row seat in this movement since the year 2000. I first met Sam Dickson on Labor Day of 2000. Thanks to Sam, I met Wilmot Robertson, Sam Francis, and Jared Taylor in the Spring of 2001. Back then, they were lonely voices, crying out in the wilderness.

Today, when you log on to social media platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok, their ideas are everywhere. Ideas that were marginal even within White Nationalist circles 15 years ago—such as secession, white genocide, and the Great Replacement—are discussed in mainstream Republican circles today.

And, since policy is downstream from culture, we are seeing progress in the political realm: the border is closed to illegal migrants, deportations are happening, DEI and “wokeness” are being pushed back, and there are now serious discussions about dismantling the Civil Rights regime.

None of this would have happened without our movement. For all our follies, schisms, and tactical errors, we’ve been doing something right. I call it “metapolitics”: basically, building communities and changing minds, the battle of ideas. In America, the best part of “third” political parties and “activist” groups is also building communities and spreading ideas, including what can be called “propaganda of the deed.” The rest is baggage that is best discarded.

The battle of ideas has two main dimensions. The first is simply informing people of important facts, for instance, facts about racial differences, diversity, immigration, and globalization that doom the multicultural experiment.

But the facts aren’t enough. I have met many people in the last quarter century who are fully informed about the issues discussed in this room. Yet they choose to do nothing. Or worse, they choose to actively collaborate with the system.

The problem here is not a lack of facts. The problem is what they choose to do, or not do, based on the facts. It is not a question of what is but of what ought to be, specifically what we ought to do. In short, it is a moral issue.

The biggest moral impediment to white identity politics is the idea that racism and nationalism are evil—but only for white people. The racism and nationalism of other groups are to be encouraged. That’s it: the fake moral imperative that vetoes every policy white people need to survive. Thus it vetoes white survival itself.

This blatant double standard is premised ultimately on the idea that white people are uniquely evil and thus do not deserve good government or nice things. White extinction is a moral imperative. This heinous dogma animates the Left and paralyzes any resistance.

This is how I see the political domain. Our enemies are the people who wield the charge of “racism” (meaning white racism) as a club. Our false friends are the people who cringe and cower before that word. Sadly, that includes Donald Trump, who resorts to ridiculous measures to insure himself against that charge: photo ops with Kanye West, sentencing reform, pardons for rappers, the Platinum Plan, and so forth. White Nationalists are the people for whom the word “racism” has no power.

Much of the progress we have made in recent years is due simply to the weakening of this absurd moral inhibition on white identity politics.

But there is a deeper source of moral reluctance to getting involved with our cause. You hear this when people warn you: “Don’t go to American Renaissance. Don’t talk about White Nationalism, not even on the internet with a pen name. Because if people find out, your life will be ruined.”

What kind of life can be ruined by frank talk about race? Obviously, your economic life. You can lose a job. I have lived with financial precarity my whole adult life, so I know how devastating that can be. But how did economic life become identified with life as such?

That’s a long story that takes us back to the beginning of modern times, when the following view of human nature emerged. Life is short and insecure. Human beings do not just want to survive, we want to thrive. Reason is a tool by which we can conquer nature and reorder human society to secure life, liberty, and property.

The main impediments to this project are the Throne and the Altar, i.e., the aristocracy and clergy. Aristocrats are driven to extravagance and war in the pursuit of vain ideas about honor and glory. Priests are driven to asceticism and war because of ideas of the religious sort.

Modern men see themselves as producers and consumers. That’s life. The biggest threats to economic life are people who put ideas and honor ahead of self-preservation and comfort. Superstition versus science, war versus peace, and extravagance or asceticism versus the rational and industrious accumulation of wealth: these are the greatest threats to modern man.

There’s a word for people who regard honor and idealism as threats to life and comfort, a word used by critics of modernity on both the Left and the Right, a word dripping with contempt. That word is “bourgeois,” a French word for the urban, capitalist middle class.

We should all be grateful to the rational and industrious bourgeoisie, who have dramatically improved human life. But it is true that bourgeois types are not the best revolutionaries. Nor are they particularly good conservatives.

Leftists are idealists. They are willing to kill and die over ideas. This gives them enormous advantages. They have greater emotional intensity and are willing to do more to win. In any battle, other things being equal, the party that is willing to risk more—even life itself—has an advantage. Thus in a battle with the Left, conservatives lack an edge. This is why conservatives conserve nothing.

If the pure bourgeois type—the rational and industrious producer-consumer—cannot create or conserve a bourgeois society, is he even a political agent? There is something deeply apolitical—even antipolitical—about his aspirations. This becomes clearest in libertarianism, the purest bourgeois political philosophy, which envisions a world with no borders (and none of the us-versus-them that gives rise to politics), as well as a minimal state or even no state at all.

Now let’s revisit our hypothetical internet lurker who agrees with White Nationalism but is afraid to get involved because he’s been told “You’ll ruin your life!” If you think your life will be “ruined” by politics, that might be because you have defined life in apolitical terms.

But if you refuse to participate in politics, you are just a plaything of the people who do. You might not want to think about politics, but politics thinks about you. The libertarian just wants to be left alone. When he realizes that he needs to join a collective to force other people to leave him alone, he is no longer a libertarian.

If the bourgeois type is inherently antipolitical, then “bourgeois revolution” is a contradiction in terms. So what of the American Revolution? Wasn’t that the consummate bourgeois revolution? We all know these words from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

How many times have you heard these words piously intoned by people who don’t believe in a “Creator” or any religion at all but fervently wish that you adopt equality as a civil religion?

The words “Life,” “Liberty,” “Happiness,” and “Safety” are all capitalized here. What could be more bourgeois than that? How could such men create a revolution, which by its very nature imperils life, liberty, and safety?

To understand this, we need to look to the end of the Declaration:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

After these words, 56 men signed their names. The youngest three—Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, Thomas Lynch, Jr., also of South Carolina, and George Walton of Georgia—were 26 years old. The next oldest were 30: Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania and Thomas Heyward, Jr., of South Carolina. The oldest, Benjamin Franklin, was 70. The average age of the signers was a little over 42.

It is important to understand that these men were pledging to risk losing their lives and fortunes, which is the last thing that bourgeois men would do. What made this possible? The key to understanding this is the last item on the list, their honor. They were not pledging to lose their honor, which is why it is characterized as “sacred.”

If the bourgeois value system prizes life, liberty, property, and safety over honor and idealism, then the American Founders did not have a bourgeois value system. Instead, they held that honor is sacred, but life and property were not. This is the aristocratic value system scorned by the bourgeoisie.

If a bourgeois man is given a choice—your honor or your life—he will choose life. Aristocrats, however, prefer death to dishonor. If given the choice between life and honor, aristocrats prefer to die with their sacred honor intact.

What is this honor that the Founders held to be sacred? These were men who fought duels to the death over personal slights. Two of the signers actually fought duels: Burton Gwinnett and George Walton, both of Georgia. Gwinnett actually died from wounds sustained in a duel.

But the Revolution was not over personal slights but systematic abuses, which are detailed in the Declaration. The Founders believed they were owed a certain amount of respect as free men.

But to secure your freedom, sometimes you must risk your life. This value system throws light on a perennial complaint about the Founders: How could they believe in the rights to life, liberty, and happiness but tolerate and even practice chattel slavery?

The great German Idealist philosopher Hegel claimed that history begins with a duel to the death over honor. Such a duel is a test of character. If a man prefers death to dishonor, he will either die fighting or live victorious. If, however, he prefers dishonor to death, he will be willing to live on in defeat as a slave of the victor. For Hegel, the duel to the death over honor shows that some men are free or servile by nature, natural masters or natural slaves.

To put it bluntly, many of our ancestors regarded slaves with contempt for preferring to live on as slaves rather than die as free men. Now, that is an easy thing to say. But the Founders would have held themselves in contempt for making that choice as well. And when the opportunity presented itself, they put their lives on the line to live as free men.

None of the signatories of the Declaration were titled aristocrats. Nearly half of them (25) were lawyers. Law is the best-represented profession in our movement as well. There were also four physicians and one clergyman. The rest were farmers, merchants, and craftsmen. After the revolution, many of the signatories went on to have political careers. But all of them were businessmen to some extent. They knew how to make and manage money. They had material ambitions. They valued comfort and security to some extent.

All of these men knew they had but one life to live or lose, so they dared not waste it over small things. They all knew that discretion is the better part of valor.

They were men with a lot to lose, and they knew that when they signed the Declaration. Surely, there were people who tried to dissuade them, who told them, “You’ll ruin your life!” Surely, some people took that advice, but history does not record their names.

Those who did sign valued their honor and liberty more than their lives and property. And because of this, they launched a revolution while their more bourgeois neighbors played it safe.

So how do we overcome the reluctance of our own bourgeois friends and neighbors to get involved? How do we quiet our inner bourgeois, so we can do more for the cause?

We should, of course, do everything we can to make it safer for people to get involved. For instance, we can provide secure ways to send donations. We can protect people’s identities. We can secure our gatherings against protestors, spies, and thugs. We can promote legislation protecting people against being fired for expressing their political convictions. We can promote legislation to make the First Amendment one of the terms of service for every social media platform, bank, bookseller, and payment processor. We can help people who are doxed.

But we can’t make it safer for others if we play it safe ourselves. They say courage is contagious, but someone needs to be courageous first.

So we return to the moral problem: we can’t reduce the risks of revolution to zero, so we must increase our tolerance of risk above zero. A good way to begin is to teach people that there’s more to life than the pursuit of comfort and security. Indeed, if everybody thought that way, history never would have happened. We need to study the psychology of heroism, for virtually every great man of history risked “ruining his life” by bourgeois standards.

Tacitus once said, “The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.” There is no cause on earth greater and nobler than White Nationalism. Our cause is to give white people a future again. Compared to that, the complaints of America’s Founders against King George III are trivial. Whites in every country, every day silently suffer indignities that would have caused their ancestors to draw swords.

Our enemies think we have become a race of sheep, fit only to be sheared and slaughtered. But our genes have not changed, only our morals have. It all comes down to a simple choice, a choice that our modern educational system never told us that we have: When there is a conflict between our honor and our appetites, which part of us wins out? Are there any values above life itself? Is there anything worth dying for?

Today, our default programming is bourgeois. But we are now learning that if we are unwilling to risk death over matters of principle, our enemies can take everything from us, even our whole race’s future, bit by stealthy bit. By putting our lives and fortunes before our honor, we will have none of them in the end.

The moral revolution comes first, and it begins with the question: What kind of men do you choose to be?

Thank you.

Counter-Currents, November 17, 2025

Late last year, my big prediction for 2026 was that Donald Trump would be forced to step down as US President because he was destroying the coalition that elected him, thus making it increasingly likely that the Left would return to power with a vengeance. That, frankly, is a terrifying prospect, especially to people like Elon Musk, who will probably be destroyed if the Left gets back in the White House.

Trump has a long-standing pattern of betraying and abusing his supporters and allies while courting the favor of his enemies. Trump, apparently, feels entitled to our support. Thus he is unwilling to actually earn it. But he will work for the approval of his enemies. Why? Obviously, because he prizes their opinion but not ours. It is high time for his abused and exploited supporters to repay his contempt and betrayal in kind.

Trump’s second administration got off to a good start. But then came his arrogant betrayal on the Epstein files and the Twelve Day War against Iran. After that was his shameless abuse of Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

At a certain point, Trump’s arrogance seemed to cross the line into insanity. Remember, just a couple months ago, his embarrassing public tantrum over the Nobel Peace Prize, Greenland, and NATO? At that point, I had declared the MAGA coalition dead and fully expected a Republican bloodbath in the upcoming midterm elections—unless Trump could be persuaded to step down.

And that was before the ongoing Iran debacle. We have now ended week three of Trump’s three-day special military operation in Iran. Apparently, Trump bet everything—and I mean everything, including the global economy, America’s future, and his personal survival—on killing Iran’s 86-year-old spiritual leader, Ali Khameni—at which point his regime was supposed to call it quits and allow the opposition to take over.

There was no Plan B, because when Iran’s regime did not collapse, but instead began to retaliate against Israel, American bases, and American allies and clients in the region, the United States was completely unprepared. Iran warned us, but those warnings were simply ignored.

The United States was also completely unprepared for Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, as well as 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas, 45% of the world’s urea (a nitrogen fertilizer), and large amounts of the world’s ammonia, sulfur, and helium. Iran warned us. Every sensible military analyst in Washington warned us. But those warnings were ignored.

We know Trump had no plan, because he is now thinking out loud, with no filter, in the form of late-night social media “Boomer posts.”

Ah yes, America’s notorious Persian-dominated media.

Trump has declared repeatedly that the US has completely “decimated” Iranian forces. There’s no point in telling him that “decimate” means killing one tenth. He means 100% -- or even more.

And yet, somehow, Iran keeps sending drones and missiles to destroy American bases and radar installations and to soak up American interceptor missiles.

It costs Iran only a few thousand dollars to send a Shahed drone that causes the US to spend three to four million dollars on firing interceptors. Those interceptors are becoming rapidly depleted. The US pulled them out of the Gulf states to protect Israel. Now it is pulling interceptors and radar equipment out of the Far East, which will simply widen the geopolitical instability.

Iran’s clear strategy is to blind America’s radar installations and deplete its interceptors, at which point its largest and most destructive missiles can be used to devastating effect. ZOG’s only hope is to destroy these missiles and their launchers on the ground. But at this point, I am not betting on the clowns in Washington and Jerusalem.

After years of abusing our NATO allies as parasites and cowards—and after threatening to forcibly seize the territory of a NATO ally—Trump asked NATO to come to his rescue to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Our NATO allies (who are supposedly non-sovereign “vassals” of America) have said “no,” and for good reason: NATO is a defensive alliance. Why would NATO get involved in an offensive war? Trump’s response was infantile: he didn’t need NATO’s help anyway.

The closure of the strait has caused oil and natural gas prices to spike, which will raise the price of everything else. Shortages and price spikes for urea will lead eventually to lower crop yields and higher food prices. The United Nations now estimates that as many as 45 million people, mostly in the Third World, will face hunger. Unfortunately, many of those people will end up flooding into Europe. We’ve been living with a global recession since 2020, so it is time to dust off the dreaded “D” word. Depression.

Even if the war ended tomorrow, it would take at least two weeks to get shipping back to normal. Because the Gulf states rapidly ran out of oil and gas storage capacity, they had to shut their wells down. Even if the war ended today, it would take months to get production back to normal. Thus, as far as a global economic catastrophe is concerned, we are already long past the point of no return.

And there is no sign of the war ending anytime soon.

Indeed, the war is now escalating, with Israel striking Iranian oil and gas facilities, which has provoked Iranian retaliation against Gulf oil and gas facilities. This can only prolong and deepen the global economic consequences.

Iran is currently sending oil tankers through the strait, primarily bound for China. Intriguingly, they have offered to allow other tankers to pass, as long as the cargos are paid for in Chinese yuan. This is, of course, an attempt to dethrone the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which could have far more serious consequences for America than a global oil and gas shock.

Trump would be an idiot to stop these tankers, because it will only upset China and further raise prices all over the world. But Trump was an idiot for starting this war in the first place, so no escalation is off the table. Soon the US might be competing with Iran to throttle the global economy.

It is slowly dawning on ZOG that a military victory might be impossible. Even if they could completely destroy Iran, Iran could take the global economy and American military and economic hegemony down with them. Only China will gain anything from this war, simply by sitting it out.

This war is not just a betrayal of an America First foreign policy. It also undermines another key commitment to Trump’s base: the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. Trump is using the economic consequences of the war as an excuse to back off on deportations, so as not to further upset “the economy,” i.e., upset the oligarchs who want to pay American workers less by importing cheap immigrant labor. So much for nationalism and populism. The betrayal is now complete.

Trump, of course, is not up for re-election. Which means that Republicans with presidential ambitions, like J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio, are nervous. It was always a long shot that the Trump coalition would turn out in full for conventional GOP candidates. That seems impossible now. There will be a bloodbath at the midterms, and the prospects of a Republican presidential win in 2028 diminish with each passing day. If Trump won’t resign, Vance and Rubio might have to, if they wish to maintain any political viability.

The first resignation happened this week: Joe Kent, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned to protest the war, on the grounds that Iran posed no imminent threat to America. Instead, he claims, Trump entered this war because of the influence of Israel and its American lobby. Even the New York Times agrees with this narrative. Whether from conscience or careerism, there will probably be more resignations. Only the rats will remain on this sinking ship.

I imagine that Trump is looking for an offramp. Time is not on his side. But with whom would he negotiate? The son of the man he assassinated? And why would the Iranians negotiate with the man who attacked them twice already under the pretext of negotiations? Trump is now reduced to demanding negotitations—or he’ll kill more Iranian leaders.

Trump started a war that he cannot win militarily and cannot negotiate his way out of. That sounds disqualifying to me.

Trump will have to be removed from office to end this war. The sooner the better.

When the Phoenicians faced war, famine, or plague, they would sacrifice infants to Moloch. Metaphorically, Moloch refers to an all-devouring and inhuman force. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, it symbolizes capitalism. Trump has given us the war. The famine and plagues will follow. Soon the oligarchs will be ready to sacrifice Trump to Moloch, just to get back to business. It serves him right for hanging out with Phoenicians.

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”—Yogi Berra

“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”—Plan 9 from Outer Space

Note: On September 14th, 2024, Greg Johnson spoke to the Institute for Historical Review on the question, “Will America Survive to 2040?” This essay is extracted from the notes for that talk, with a few post-election remarks added. I wish to thank Mark Weber for inviting me to speak and everyone who showed up to listen.

A lot rides on US presidential elections, so predicting the outcomes is a big business. Predictions are always tricky, but there’s one thing we know for sure: no matter who is elected president, the other half of the country will think he is illegitimate.

That wasn’t always the case. But in recent years, American politics has become so polarized that substantial numbers of Americans are now speaking of secession, “national divorce,” civil war, and even disallowing certain candidates and parties from running for office.

Aristotle’s Politics is one of the great foundational works in Western political philosophy. In it, Aristotle lays out what has come to be called the “mixed regime.” It is a mix of different social classes, basically the elite and the masses. A mixed regime has an aristocratic element, a monarchical element (usually drawn from the aristocratic class), and a popular element. These different groups play different roles in government. Aristotle describes such a regime as different groups taking turns ruling and being ruled, according to the fundamental laws that define their roles and powers.

What makes it possible for people to, in effect, hand a loaded gun to others, who belong to different social strata or factions? Obviously, they can’t be all that different to begin with. They are counting on an underlying social unity, which makes possible mutual trust, which makes it possible to cede political power to one’s rivals without fearing for your life or for the future of society.

Aristotle didn’t conceive of multiparty democracy, but in such systems, the different parties also take turns ruling and being ruled, which again is only possible against the background of deep social unity and trust.

In America today, however, we are no longer one nation divided into two parties. We are becoming two nations competing for power within the same borders. These two nations increasingly hate and fear each another. Thus, no matter the outcome of an election, both sides believe that the other side is too dangerous to be allowed to enjoy power. It doesn’t matter who gets the most votes. That’s the end of American democracy.

The Left stole the 2020 presidential election because Donald Trump was judged too dangerous to be allowed in the White House for another term, and it didn’t matter who had the most votes. Trump won in 2024, primarily because of better safeguards against fraud, but also because his margin of victory was so large that overturning it would have required the fabrication of implausible numbers of ballots. Based on their internal polls, the Democrats knew this would happen, so they apparently didn’t even try to cheat. But closer Senate and House races were stolen by the Democrats, which means that they still have both the means and the motive to steal another presidential race, should the opportunity present itself.

It is just a matter of time before team Red or team Blue decides to put an end to elections entirely. At that point, one party will establish a dictatorship and ban the other. Now, looking at the lay of the land, looking at the character of the people on both sides of the political divide, ask yourself: Who has the character, the will-to-power, to create a one-party state in America? Is it the Democratic Left? Or is it the Republican Right? Who is more likely to throw the other in a dungeon: dragon lady Nancy Pelosi or milquetoast Mike Johnson?

There’s no question that the greatest threat comes from the Left. Not only is the mainstream Right too weak to crush and proscribe the Democrats, they are also too weak to resist the Democrats doing the same to them. Their strongest instinct is to hang on to the status quo, no matter how untenable it may be, and pray that somehow things will get better, preferably without them needing to do anything courageous.

Where does this put white advocates? I loathe the Left. I would love to see their organizations outlawed and their politicians, activists, and donors barred from public life. I would like to see Leftists purged from academia and the media. I would love to live in a serious country, and that’s what a serious country would do to rid itself of Leftism.

But then I remind myself that I do not live in a serious country. And when I look at the Republican party, I honestly can’t say that I want those people to rule unopposed. If only both parties could lose. Because that’s the only way for white Americans to win.

There are a lot of White Nationalists who imagine that we can move from our present mess to a white ethnostate by means of a finite number of steps undertaken within the current political system, by existing parties and political leaders.

Now, I enjoy a good game of fantasy football as much as the next guy, but I don’t put too much stock in such plans. We just don’t know enough to plan that far ahead.

But there are some things I know about the future with varying degrees of certitude. I am certain that nothing lasts forever. I am certain that institutions built on false principles are not long for this world. I know that in a divided society, whoever is elected president will be denounced as illegitimate by the other side. I know that there are increasing numbers of people who just want to put an end to the farce of multiparty democracy in America, because it’s just too dangerous. I know that American democracy and America itself are coming to an end, as two very different nations are struggling to be born.

I know these things. But I don’t know whether America will fail as a state in 2025 or 2040. I don’t know if America—from sea to shining sea, some islands over here, fifty states united—will become a white homeland again.

But I have no doubt about the most important question for me, which is the fate of white people on the North American continent. We will create a future for ourselves in North America. But when and how we do it are still open questions.

We should be very open to different forms of government and different maps. We shouldn’t be wedded to the current American system and current American geography.

In the airplane safety instructions, they always tell you that in the unlikely event you survive a fiery or watery crash, you must exit the plane in an orderly fashion, and please don’t try to take your luggage with you.

I think white Americans are going to survive a fiery crash, and we shouldn’t be so foolish as to think that we can take all of our baggage with us. We shouldn’t be so foolish as to think that we can hold on to the institutions and territory of the current United States. We shouldn’t be like the monkey who grabs a banana in a jar and becomes trapped because he won’t let go of it. We might have to shed some possessions to save our skins. We should be open to that.

So I am a long-term optimist and short-term agnostic. But what do we do in the here and now?

We do what I’m doing right now. We spread ideas. We explain what’s wrong with diversity. Then we explain the alternative. We explain why white identity is a good thing. We explain why white identity politics is inevitable, necessary, and moral. We give people a positive image of the white ethnostate.

We don’t know how the current order will end. We don’t know how the next order will begin. But we do know that it is more likely to be a world of ethnostates if we convince people that ethnonationalism is both desirable and politically feasible.

If we don’t give people a fundamental alternative to multiculturalism, they’ll simply replicate it again and again, like California refugees replicate the problems they flee wherever they go.

This is why I will always be grateful to Donald Trump, and it has nothing to do with what he did in the White House. In fact, Trump’s greatest achievement, in my view, was on the day that he announced his candidacy for president.

The US political establishment, both Democrat and Republican, had a gentleman’s agreement never to compete on immigration and globalization. That’s the way the system is run. You have all kinds of inessential choices, but on the things where the establishment is united, you don’t get any choice.

But Trump broke that gentleman’s agreement, unleashing the forces of nationalism and populism. Large numbers of people—far larger than I suspected—were excited about that. The genie was out of the bottle.

P. J. O’Rouke was a very humorous Republican writer, yet his imagination and sense of humor failed him when he confronted the Trump phenomenon. In 2016, he endorsed Hillary Clinton, saying that “She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

What are normal parameters? They’re the things that we don’t get to vote on, like immigration and globalization. Trump was a danger, because he was outside “normal parameters.” He was a traitor to the ruling class, and that’s why they hate him.

Now, when he got into office, Trump was mostly a disappointment. And some of the good things he did on the immigration front were reversed by Biden. But Trump won a much more durable victory in the battle of ideas. He overthrew the “normal parameters” and offered an alternative that people actually want.

Nationalism and populism will outlive Trump. And as they find more adherents and better standard-bearers, they will transform American politics, and politics around the world. That’s a winning strategy. We must emulate it.

There’s a website called Demotivators, which does parodies of those motivational posters you see in offices. My favorite demotivator is a picture of a snowbank. From the top, there’s a little snowball rolling down, getting bigger. The motto is “Teamwork: A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.” That’s how politics works. Every great, world-changing social movement coalesces around a few harmless flakes challenging the “normal parameters.” But together we can unleash an avalanche of destruction, or in our case, creative destruction, an avalanche of racial rebirth for whites in North America and around the world.

On September 14th, 2024, I spoke to the Institute for Historical Review on the question, “Will America Survive to 2040?”[1] This essay was extracted from the notes for that talk. I wish to thank Mark Weber for inviting me to speak and everyone who showed up to listen.

In my lecture “What’s Wrong with Diversity,”[2] I lay out some basic arguments for why it is a bad idea to make one’s society racially and ethnically diverse. Here I want to expand upon a problem that starts as soon as diversity becomes a goal that institutions must promote.

Promoting diversity corrupts every institution, one institution at a time. Corruption means: undermining the ability of an institution to perform its proper function. Pursuing diversity turns every job into a racket. It turns every institution into a hollowed-out farce.

This process can proceed for a long time, until an institution—or a society as a whole—is tested. The test can be a war, a pandemic, civil unrest, an economic crisis, or a convergence of all of them. If the corruption is sufficiently advanced, even a minor crisis can precipitate a collapse. A healthy man will be barely slowed down by a cold, but a feeble man can be killed by one.

What makes an institution good? Institutions are created to perform certain tasks. The fire department puts out fires. The military defends the homeland. Hospitals cure the sick.

If every institution is founded to pursue a certain goal, you measure its goodness by how well it attains its goal. If an institution is excellent, everything about it is oriented towards performing its particular function.

But what happens if—in addition to all the important things that institutions do—they must also be diverse? Then you’ve introduced another value that necessarily competes with the specific goal of every institution.

Why does diversity compete with rather than complement the goals of various institutions? Because we live in a finite world, with finite resources. Thus, when an institution decides to pursue a new goal, it must redirect resources from its primary goal.

Yes, Mercy Hospital must cure the sick, but we must also ensure that our doctors and nurses are “diverse,” meaning that they include members of groups that don’t generally go into medicine. Any hospital that promotes diversity does so at the expense of its ability to promote healing.

Of course the advocates of diversity claim that there’s a vast amount of talent that is overlooked because of racism, sexism, and homophobia. By combatting these prejudices, they claim, every institution can perform better. Promoting diversity simply encourages institutions to pursue excellence in an unprejudiced manner.

But that’s not how diversity is promoted. If our institutions awarded diplomas, jobs, prison sentences, etc. in a completely unbiased manner, based solely on merit, we would find that blacks are underrepresented in prestigious professions and overrepresented in jails, because of certain inherent biological traits: lower than average IQ and higher than average time preferences, aggression, and sociopathy. We would find that women are underrepresented in professions that require physical strength and fighting skills. We would find that men are underrepresented in professions that involve empathy and multitasking.

Human beings are not biologically equal. Since different jobs require different biological abilities, not just different learned information or skills, people are not equally qualified for every job. Thus, if merit is our only standard for awarding degrees, jobs, etc., we will find some groups overrepresented, and others underrepresented, in every category.

At this point, the promoters of diversity put their cards on the table. They reject the idea of biological inequalities. Thus, they expect that all groups should be proportionally represented in all institutions of society. Hence, if blacks are underrepresented in universities and overrepresented in prisons, that is not a sign of justice but of injustice.

So, to promote diversity, institutions must assign people status based not on objective merits but on the basis of quotas. This creates incentives for every institution to award members of certain groups jobs they don’t deserve. This has two major consequences.

First, it is unjust, for undeserved degrees and jobs come at the expense of those who deserve them. Thus promoting diversity replaces unjustified racial bitterness and resentment with justified racial bitterness and resentment.

Second, replacing qualified people with less qualified ones undermines every institution’s effectiveness.

Institutions can be hollowed out for a very long time by promoting diversity over excellence. Nobody notices, nobody cares, until the institution is tested in an emergency and fails. Think of the fire department, for instance. The fire department is only called on in emergencies. The rest of the time, firemen are polishing chrome, lifting weights, and riding their fire trucks in parades. Why not, then, have firemen of every color, and firewomen too? Why not have a fire cat alongside the fire dog? It’s great for public relations! But what if there’s a fire, and the 90-pound female fireman can’t carry a 170-pound male fireman from a burning building? That is the moment of truth.

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there’s a wonderful metaphor for a hollowed out, corrupted society: a gigantic oak tree that has stood for hundreds of years only to come crashing down in a storm, which brings to light the truth, namely that the mighty oak was merely a rotted-out shell.

When institutions become hollowed out, they take on a farcical air. People don’t do their jobs so much as they go through the motions of doing their jobs. They “do their jobs.” So it should come as no surprise that jobs increasingly do not get done.

Hollowed out institutions become rackets. Every employee has two motives: contributing to the goals of his institution and taking home a paycheck. When your work no longer serves its purpose, when you are merely going through the motions because of the paycheck, your job has become a racket.

But institutions that are manned by people who have no personal commitment to the institution and its goals beyond a paycheck are fragile. Therefore, it should come as no surprise if they collapse in a crisis.

Is the problem diversity per se? Isn’t the real problem here egalitarianism? Wouldn’t institutions work best if they only recruited the best people for the job, regardless of race, sex, and so forth? And if a nation is just a collection of institutions, wouldn’t the best nation be diverse as long as it is a meritocratic?

The false assumption here is that a nation is just a collection of institutions. In truth, a nation is an organic community, an extended family. My lecture “What’s Wrong With Diversity?” deals with why diverse societies are worse than homogeneous ones.

Nations are more than just the sum of their institutions. Nations create institutions as vehicles of their collective life. A living people is an end in itself. Institutions are merely means to that end. This is why dysfunctional institutions harm society as a whole.

The idea that a nation is merely a collection of institutions leads to the absurd idea that France could still exist even if the French people were replaced by aliens, as long as the institutions remain intact. In fact, the only thing that would be preserved is the French economy.

But France is bigger than its economy. The French economy is merely a tool of the French people. Economics should never be an argument to debase the homogeneity of a nation. No sane Frenchman should care if French tourist attractions and vineyards are flourishing in 200 years if the French have been replaced by Africans. That would not be France. It would simply be a parody of France, a farce.

But don’t we deserve the very best? Doesn’t our country deserve the very best? So shouldn’t we recruit the best people from around the world to work in our institutions?

This is a very flattering pitch for immigration and diversity, but it doesn’t hold water.

First, there is really only one best person in any field, so this is hardly an argument for mass immigration. When employers give meritocratic arguments for mass immigration, they’re simply deceiving us. They don’t want the best. They simply want to drive your wages down by creating more competition for your job.

Second, chances are, you can’t afford the best person in the world, and if you could, he can always perform his services without becoming an immigrant.

Third, if we really can’t afford the best, then most of us just settle for the good enough. But somehow white countries were good enough to be the best in the world before mass immigration.

Fourth, white countries were never tempted to import nonwhites before the collapse of their educational systems and birthrates, largely due to bad ideas and bad policies, principally egalitarianism and feminism. Rather than deal with these problems, the leaders of white countries seek merely to palliate them by opening their doors to the Third World. But since the same problems are afoot in the Third World, this is hardly a sustainable solution, and aren’t we all about “sustainability” these days?

Finally, how did it become progressive and virtuous for white countries to “brain drain” the Third World of their doctors, engineers, etc.? White countries already have far more doctors per capita than Third World countries, so why do immigration advocates preen about using the services of doctors who are desperately needed in their homelands?

Diversity plus egalitarianism will destroy any institution, which undermines the rest of society. Diversity plus meritocracy may help institutions, but it still makes the society around them worse off as a whole. Far from being a strength, diversity is a form of corruption. That’s how diversity destroys everything.

Counter-Currents, October 28, 2024

[1] Greg Johnson, “Will America Survive to 2040?,” audio, Counter-Currents, September 27, 2024.

[2] Greg Johnson, “What’s Wrong with Diversity?,” in The White Nationalist Manifesto (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2018).

Greg Johnson’s address at the Seventh Northwest Forum, March 24, 2018.

There are contexts in which diversity is a good thing. For instance, diversity of goods in the marketplace, diversity of options in life, diversity of opinions in politics and academia, and a diversity of points of view on juries for awarding prizes or deciding court cases.

But in the context of contemporary politics, diversity means something very specific, namely integrating a variety of different races and ethnic groups into the same society or institution. Diversity also refers to integrating women and sexual minorities into institutions that traditionally excluded them, such as the military. Obviously, one can imagine a society without racial and ethnic diversity, but one cannot imagine a society without both men and women. One can, however, imagine a society in which men and women have fairly distinct social realms and roles.

Multiculturalism, multiracialism, feminism, and the LGBTQ agenda constitute the primary sense of diversity today. The people promoting it often have very little use for diversity of opinions and freedom of choice. This politically correct version of diversity is my focus here.

It is no exaggeration to say that praising diversity is the civil religion of our time. Whereas in the past, it was obligatory for everyone—especially the ambitious and powerful—to pay lip service to Christianity, today people compete to offer the most fulsome praise and heartfelt professions of faith to the God of diversity. Beginning with Bill Clinton, US Presidents—Republican and Democrat—have repeated the mantra that “diversity is America’s greatest strength.” Not just any strength, but our greatest strength.

Even as the military, police, and fire departments lower standards of physical strength to increase diversity, they proclaim that their true strength lies in diversity itself. Indeed, in 2007, General George Casey, then in command of all US troops in Iraq, proclaimed that “I firmly believe that the strength of our Army comes from our diversity.”[1] Not weapons, not technology, not training, not the muscles and character of men, not the unity of a common purpose. But diversity. Let us hope this theory is never tested in battle against a serious opponent.

Even as educational institutions lower admissions and graduation standards, gut curricula of demanding classes, create entire disciplines to give degrees and academic jobs to members of marginalized identity groups, and spend vast sums on minority recruitment and diversity propaganda, they claim that education is stronger than ever because of all the diversity, even though by all objective measures, society is spending more on education and people are learning less than ever before.

The same delusional thinking is rampant throughout every other sector of society: business, religion, charities, the arts, etc.

White Nationalists oppose diversity. We want racially and culturally homogeneous homelands for all white peoples. Because our views go against the whole cultural and political mainstream, White Nationalists need to have a good answer to the question, “What’s wrong with diversity?” Here are four reasons why diversity would be a bad thing, even if whites were not threatened with extinction.

1. Diversity Means White Dispossession

The first and foremost reason why diversity is bad is quite simple. Whenever we talk about increasing diversity in a community or a business or a church or a school, that is always a euphemism for having fewer white people. Why in the world would white people think that’s desirable? There’s really no good answer to that.

So when someone says, “You’ve got a nice little town here—it’s affluent, it’s clean, it’s friendly—but it lacks a certain diversity,” the proper answer is: “So, you think there are too many white people here? What’s wrong with white people? Why don’t you like white people?”

Now some might respond that they don’t wish to decrease the number of white people. They just want to add some spice. But this reply assumes that there’s no such thing as scarcity, so that you can add new people to a community without increasing costs and decreasing benefits to the people who are already there. Yet it is legitimate to ask if increasing diversity will take away opportunities from whites while increasing traffic, crime, alienation, conflict, and other social burdens.

Beyond that, even if someone says he does not wish to decrease the absolute number of white people, he is still maintaining that there are too many white people as a percentage of the overall population. So demand to know why he wants the white population to be diluted.

If diversity just means white dispossession, then obviously it’s a bad thing for white people. Obviously white people were bound to start resenting it. Now we are starting to resist it. White Nationalism is simply the inevitable resistance to the anti-white ethnic cleansing that we call diversity. Welcome to the resistance.

Of course increasing diversity is bad for the native peoples of any land, not just whites. When whites came to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, weren’t they just increasing the diversity of the place? My first ancestor to arrive in the Americans set foot in Jamestown in 1618. He was fleeing oppression and poverty. He was trying to build a better life for himself and his family. And he was bringing diversity to the New World. But whites never get any credit for that. It’s always described as colonialism and genocide when whites do it. Isn’t it just as bad when non-whites do it to us?

2. Diversity Weakens All Institutions

Diversity, we are told, will strengthen literally everything. Presumably this strength means that every institution touched by diversity will perform its function better. Neighborhoods will be better places to live. Governments will better promote justice and harmony. Schools will better educate and train students. Hospitals will better heal the sick. Armies and police will produce more security. Firemen and EMTs will save more lives. Churches will save more souls. Businesses will produce more profits. And so forth.

But this makes no sense. Every institution is defined by its goals. Thus to function well, every institution must find people who are good at promoting its goals. Teachers have to teach. Firemen have to fight fires. Soldiers have to fight enemies. Etc. The primary criterion for hiring and promoting people in any institution is ability to contribute to the institution’s purpose. No institution can be improved by introducing competing criteria of success, like diversity.

Therefore, as soon as diversity becomes the “greatest strength” of any institution, people will naturally lower its proper standards of success to promote diversity. For instance, soldiers and firemen must be physically strong to perform their functions. But when diversity becomes a value—especially the integration of women into professions requiring physical strength—standards are inevitably lowered, thus weakening the institution in the most important way: by making it less capable of performing its function. Thus diversity is not a strength. It is a weakness.

3. Diversity is a Source of Conflict

Diversity is a source of conflict within institutions and within societies as a whole. These conflicts impede them in performing their proper functions, even if one does not adopt the goal of artificially promoting diversity. A school divided by conflict cannot teach as well as a harmonious one. An army divided by conflict cannot fight as well as a unified one. A society riven by conflict is a less pleasant place to live than a peaceful one.

The idea that any society or institution is improved by diversity is an aberration of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. No serious political philosopher or statesman of the past would have entertained the idea for a moment.

The aim of politics is to create social order and harmony. Basically, it’s the problem of getting along with one another. Social life has to deliver net benefits to its participants, or people will go their separate ways, and society will collapse. But beyond that, since we’re not just selfish individualists, we need to cultivate social responsibility and investment, so that people work to better society and are actually willing to die to ensure that it is preserved and perpetuated. Those are the great problems of politics: creating social harmony and a deep sense of an identification with the body politic, responsibility to the body politic, willingness to lay down one’s life for the body politic.

Now, how does racial and ethnic diversity help with those goals? Imagine you’re living on a leafy, idyllic suburban street where lots of children play. As the population grows and traffic congestion gets worse, however, you notice that a lot of people are driving through your neighborhood rather fast. They’ve discovered that your street is a short-cut from one clogged artery to another, so they’re racing through your once peaceful neighborhood, endangering little kids.

You decide to do something about it. You want the city to install speed bumps. To do this, you must first go to your neighbors and get them on your side, so you can go as a bloc to petition the city for speed bumps. But to get your neighbors on board, you need to be able to communicate with them. Wouldn’t that be nice? But in America today, there are lots of neighborhoods where you cannot communicate with your neighbors anymore. They don’t speak the same language.

Beyond that, even if you speak the same language, you still need to have the same values. White nations are now being colonized by people who are not invested in them at all. They are here simply to take. They come from societies that are characterized by public squalor and private splendor. Inside the walls of their houses, everything is lovely, but out in the streets there are dead dogs and potholes, and that’s just fine with them. That’s their value system. Try motivating people with that value system to get involved with putting speed bumps on your street, even if they have little kids, even if it might protect them. It’s very difficult.

To pursue common aims, you need to already have things in common. You need a common language for communication. You need to know each other’s minds. But then when you know each other’s minds, you’ve got to have the same values, or you’re never going to be able to pursue the same goals.

Diversity undermines all of these things. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to pursue or preserve the many social goods that were created when the United States or Sweden or any other European society was predominantly European, i.e., when people spoke the same language, had the same values, knew each other’s minds, and felt they could give to the community because it wasn’t going to be an act of unreciprocated self-sacrifice. Increased diversity causes decreased social trust, decreased social commitment, and the destruction of the public realm. That’s not good for society.

Thus philosophers and statesmen through the ages have considered racial, ethnic, and religious homogeneity to be enormous blessings. For instance, American Founder John Jay—who had to think more deeply about the sources of political order than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama—noted with pleasure in Federalist Papers No. 2 that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs . . .” Jay did not even regard Negro slaves or American Indians to be part of the American people. The Founders believed that trying to integrate them into the new system on equal footing with whites would have made the new society weaker, not stronger.

Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, had to create order in a multiracial society, which led him to embrace authoritarianism, not liberal democracy. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Yew stated, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”[2] Thus democracy in a multiracial context was not consistent with political order, particularly a political order that could pursue a common good. Democracy cannot reliably arrive at a governing consensus unless the people who vote are already quite similar to one another. Without a relatively homogeneous population, order has to be imposed from the top down. Thus as diversity increases, democracy fails.

The ancient verity that diversity causes conflict is also supported by contemporary social science. For instance, Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam studied 41 communities in the United States, ranging from highly diverse to highly homogeneous. He found that social trust was strongly correlated with homogeneity and social distrust with diversity. He found that even people of the same race and ethnic group trust one another less when they live in diverse communities. After eliminating other possible causes for variations in social trust, Putnam concluded that “diversity per se has a major effect.”[3] Diversity leads to the breakdown of social trust, which leads to the general decay of social order. Thus, according to Putnam, in diverse communities people trust the government and media less, feel politically disempowered, participate less in politics and community projects, volunteer less, give less to charities, have fewer friends, spend more time watching TV, and feel less happy about their lives.

Political scientist Tatu Vanhanen arrived at similar conclusions from a comparative study of diversity and conflict in 148 countries.[4] Vanhanen found that social conflict is not strongly correlated with differences of wealth and poverty, or with differences between democratic and authoritarian governments. But it is strongly correlated with diversity. Whether they are rich or poor, democratic or authoritarian, diverse societies have more conflict than homogeneous societies, which are more harmonious, regardless of levels of wealth or democratization.

Promoting diversity is a bad way to run any society, even ones not threatened by demographic decline.

4. The Deepest Source of Social Harmony

Why is diversity a source of disharmony? And why is similarity a source of harmony? Is it entirely a matter of culture, namely a common language and system of values? Or is there something more, something deeper? White Nationalists argue that the ultimate source of political harmony is not culture. It’s genetics.

The civic nationalist idea is basically that we can create a unified and harmonious society out of radically different groups of people if we assimilate them to a common language and system of values. Civic nationalists cling to the idea of assimilation, because without it, they will have to break the dreaded taboo of “racism.”

Of course we are not even trying to assimilate immigrants today. We have lost the cultural self-confidence to insist that foreigners adopt our norms and way of life. Beyond that, immigrants are very aggressively trying to assimilate us, one taco at a time. Furthermore, until such time as we regain the self-confidence to try to assimilate outsiders, conservative assimilationists should support a complete halt to immigration. And we have to ask: Do conservatives really want to assimilate our most recent immigrants? Can these people actually improve America or any other white country?

Frankly, I am glad that assimilationism was abandoned when we opened our borders to the Third World. I don’t want to assimilate non-whites at all, for the more assimilated they become, the more likely they are to intermarry with whites and to gain power and influence in our societies. Thus it is best that their communities remain as separate and alienated as possible, rather than become entangled with the rest of society. It will make it much easier for them to go home someday.

But even if we regained enough cultural self-confidence to demand assimilation, it isn’t an easy thing. Most Americans today are a mixture of different European stocks. Some people think, “Well, that was easy.” But it wasn’t. Even the most superficial acquaintance with American history teaches us there was enormous conflict when very similar groups came from Europe to the United States.

The people of the British Isles are very similar to one another genetically and culturally. They even speak a common language. But the Irish were not welcome in America, primarily because of a single cultural difference: Catholicism. But that was enough to create enormous conflict and ill will.

These conflicts were exacerbated when even more culturally different groups came to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe. Because of these conflicts, the United States passed an immigration restriction act in 1924, not to deal with non-white immigration, which was virtually non-existent, but with white immigration from Europe.

I’m glad that America got through these crises and managed to meld different European immigrant groups into a new people: Americans. I am absolutely opposed to any attempts, even under the guise of humor, to reopen old ethnic conflicts in America. We are all Americans now, and most of the time when white people claim a hyphenated American identity, it is simply a case of a person of mixed European ancestry claiming to be Italian or Irish or Polish because of his surname.

Assimilation also had enormous cultural costs. For instance, Americans used to care passionately about the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism. To assimilate large numbers of Catholic immigrants, Americans eventually simply stopped caring about religious differences. We stopped caring about a lot of historical and cultural differences between Europeans, just so we could stop fighting over them. Cultural assimilation, in short, erases cultural differences. Ceasing to care about them is a creeping form of nihilism that has alienated us from our ancestors, who would regard us as unworthy heirs who have abandoned their cultural legacy.

So it is absurd to say, “It was a breeze assimilating all these European groups, so let’s toss Pakistanis and Somalis into the melting pot!” It was hard enough to assimilate fellow Europeans. So why borrow trouble by importing even more radically different people? There is no selfish benefit or moral imperative that requires us to turn our societies into battlegrounds once again. Especially because this time, it is a battle we cannot win, since radically alien peoples could not be assimilated, even if we tried.

It was possible to assimilate fellow Europeans only because they weren’t that different to begin with. The United States never managed to assimilate blacks, American Indians, and Asians, most of whom are merely in America, not part of it. White assimilation was possible because, beyond all our cultural differences, we are genetically very similar.

Whites are actually the most genetically similar of all the races, because there were points in time in our evolutionary history when there were very few of us, and we all have common descent. So the genetic differences between Eastern and Western Europe and Northern and Southern Europe are quite small, and this genetic similarity was enough to bridge wide cultural gaps and conflicts.

5. Genetic Similarity Theory

J. Philippe Rushton was an evolutionary psychologist who is best known for his book Race, Evolution, and Behavior. He is less well-known for his research in what he called Genetic Similarity Theory.[5] When Rushton introduced the idea to me it was in the context of interpersonal relationships. He said, “Opposites don’t attract, and I can prove it with science.” But he could just as well have said, “Diversity causes conflict, and I can prove it with science.”

Genetic Similarity Theory shows that affection, harmony, and altruism among humans—and living things in general—are functions of genetic similarity. The more genetically similar two creatures are, the more likely they will have harmonious relationships.

The ultimate explanation for this is the biological imperative for genes to replicate themselves. One might think that this imperative would lead to ruthlessly selfish and competitive behavior. But it does not, because the genes that seek to propagate themselves are present in multiple individuals. One shares the most genes with immediate family, fewer and fewer genes with more distant relatives, and some genes with everyone in one’s broader ethnic and racial group.

Thus each individual will have a tendency toward cooperative, harmonious, and even altruistic behavior toward those who share more of his genes. Individuals are even capable of sacrificing their lives for their families and communities if it secures the greater propagation of their genes among their fellows.

But the flip side of loving one’s own is hostility to outsiders. Thus human beings and other animals are willing to fight strangers to protect the genetic interests of their family, tribe, nation, and race. This is the foundation of politics, and politics by other means, namely war.

The science behind Genetic Similarity Theory is very strong. But we don’t actually need Rushton’s studies to prove this to us, because we are all familiar with a phenomenon that shows that genetic similarity breeds harmony: identical twins. Identical twins have the same exact genes.

I once met a pair of identical twins, and one of them said something quite touching and memorable. It should be the title of a book about twins. He said, “We’re not so much two people as one egg divided.” That was an indication of the level of harmony between them. Just sitting and watching them converse and interact, you could see that they knew exactly what the other was going to say, what the other was thinking; they could finish one another’s sentences. And indeed, studies of identical twins, especially twins raised apart, demonstrate how massive and fine-grained genetic determinism really is, as opposed to environmental and cultural factors.[6]

The greatest harmony between two people is the harmony of identical twins. They know one another’s minds in ways that even fraternal twins or ordinary siblings just don’t. In fact, if you wanted to create the most harmonious society possible, it would be a society of clones. Of course you would need a bit more genetic diversity if you wanted to have sexual reproduction, but surprisingly little. In Iceland, it was discovered that the most harmonious marriages and the most offspring come from people who are as genetically similar as third and fourth cousins.[7]

Genetic Similarity Theory would predict that the happiest societies in the world are also the most genetically homogeneous. This is certainly true in the case of Denmark, which is routinely rated the happiest country in the world[8] and is also one of the most genetically homogeneous.[9] Genetic Similarity Theory also predicts that as a society increases genetic diversity, it will become less harmonious, unified, and happy. Even if such a society somehow managed to “assimilate” this increasing diversity to a common language and system of values, it would still be less harmonious and happy than a genetically homogeneous society. A society can increase its genetic diversity even by assimilating people of the same race, but the most dramatic increase in genetic diversity comes from immigrants of entirely different races. Increased racial diversity makes a society weaker and less harmonious. Diversity is not a strength at all.

White Nationalism is simply the idea of a society where everybody around you is kin. It is a society where you can understand and trust your fellow citizens. Where you can cooperate to pursue the common good. Where you will wish to contribute to grand projects, even though you might not live to see them completed. Where people plant trees so that future generations can enjoy shade. It is a society in which people feel such a strong identity with the body politic that they are willing to sacrifice their lives for it, if they must. But most importantly, it is a society in which you can feel at home. That’s what White Nationalism is about: securing homelands for all white peoples.

Without homelands, our people feel rootless, detached, and alienated. They long to be around people with the same culture, history, and destiny. But it is more than that. They also long to be around people who vibrate on the same deep, unconscious frequencies of white racial kinship that bind us all together. That’s what White Nationalism wants to create again for our people.

We stand for brotherhood and belonging. Diversity takes those away. That’s what’s wrong with diversity.

[1] J. D. Leopold, “Gen. Casey Announces Creation of Diversity Task Force,” U.S. Army, December 3, 2007.

[2] “Lee Kuan Yew Interview,” Information Processing, August 14, 2005.

[3] Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies, 30 (2007), p. 153.

[4] Tatu Vanhanen, Ethnic Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism (Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press, 1999).

[5] J. P. Rushton, “Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology, and Genetic Similarity Theory,” Nations and Nationalism 11 (2005): 489–507.

[6] Nancy Segal, Born Together―Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

[7] Heidi Ledford, “When Kissing Cousins are Good for Kids,” Nature, February 7, 2008.

[8] Marie Helweg-Larsen, “Why Denmark Is the Happiest Country,” Live Science, March 30, 2018.

[9] Genetics Society of America, “Genomic Study of High School Students from Across Denmark Reveals Remarkable Genetic Homogeneity,” Science Daily, October 11, 2016.

Race realism is the thesis that racial differences are objective facts of nature, which pre-exist human consciousness, human society, and even the human race itself—since there were different species and subspecies before mankind emerged.

Nature must be understood in contrast to conventions—like human languages and laws—which do not exist independent of human consciousness and society.

As objective facts of nature, racial differences cannot be safely ignored. Nor can natural racial differences be transformed simply by altering legal or linguistic conventions. Conventions can only alter racial realities by guiding human action to change nature itself. For instance, if we institute eugenic or dysgenic incentives, this will change the genes of future generations.

The opposite of race realism is the idea of the “social construction of race,” the thesis that racial differences are not objective facts but rather shared social conventions, which may vary from time to time and from place to place, like languages and table manners.

The social construction of race is one of the intellectual foundations of racial egalitarianism, for if race is socially constructed, then so is racial inequality. This offers the possibility that racial inequality can be replaced with equality simply by altering social conventions, like laws and language.

The Basis of Race Realism

The basis of race realism is sense experience. Different races appear different from one another. Different subraces appear different from one another. Racially mixed children appear different from pure specimens. Even races that appear superficially similar—like Australian aborigines and African blacks—appear to be different on closer inspection. Careful observers do not confuse the two. Racial differences are not just a matter of “skin color,” but of morphology and behavior as well, both of which can be observed empirically.^[1]

Note that I do not claim that racial realism is based in science. People were aware of racial differences long before the emergence of science. Science comes along only later, to explain observable racial differences. Scientific theories are, moreover, verified or falsified based on their ability to explain observed racial differences. Observable racial differences are, therefore, the Alpha and the Omega of racial science. Thus the foundation of race realism is sense experience, not scientific theorizing.

This is important to understand, because it implies that problems with theories of race do not in any way alter the perceptible differences between races.

It is also important to understand that race realism is the default, common-sense position of all mankind. We observe differences between races, subraces, and hybrids—human and otherwise—before we learn words to communicate and classify them, and before we create theories to explain them.

I vividly remember my first experience of a non-white: a waiter in the dining car of a train. I was 4 or 5 years old. I was especially taken by the contrast in color between the back and the front of the man’s hands. When he went away, I asked my mother what I had seen, and she told me that he was not just a white man turned brown, but a different kind of man called a “Negro.” But I already saw the differences before I was told the name and explanation. Indeed, I asked for an explanation because I saw the differences. My mother and I certainly did not construct the differences that were apparent to all.

Given that race realism is the default, common-sense position, proponents of social constructivism need to offer arguments for their claim. In this essay, I criticize four arguments for the social construction of race, which I characterize as follows: (1) the argument from the social construction of knowledge in general; (2) the argument from changing racial classifications; (3) the argument from continua; and (4) the argument from the silence of science. This is not an exhaustive list, nor is this a “scholarly” survey and critique.^[2] I chose these arguments simply because they are commonly used in middle-brow online debates. I conclude by treating the thesis of the social construction of race as a social construct itself, exposing the political agenda and power relations behind social constructivism.

1. The Social Construction of Knowledge in General

One argument for the social construction of race is a simple deduction from the general thesis that “All knowledge is socially constructed.” This is a philosophical thesis about the relationship between mind and reality, which holds that there is no single correct account of any aspect of reality, but rather a plurality of equally valid accounts which are relative to the contingent circumstances of different communities. For instance, there is the scientific account of the origin of the species, and there is the Biblical account, both of which are products of different communities, and there is no neutral standpoint or criterion that allows us to claim that one approach is better or truer than another.

I believe that this sort of relativism is philosophically incoherent in itself.^[3] But it also fails as a justification of the social construction of race because, in a sense, it proves too much. For if everything is a social construct, the concept loses all utility. Social construction only makes sense if there is a contrast term, namely objective natural facts.

But if everything is a social construct, then we have to ask: Is the social construct race more like the social construct money or the social construct gravity? Because it is in society’s power to change money, but it is not in our power to change gravity. A philosopher who defends the idea that gravity is a social construct still leaves the lecture hall by the door rather than the window because he knows that one ignores some social constructs at one’s own risk.

The social constructivist clearly wants race to be like money rather than gravity, but if everything is a social construct, he needs to offer an additional argument to prove that racial inequalities can be abolished by social fiat.

2. Changing Racial Classifications

One of the most common arguments for the social construction of race is along the following lines: (1) If racial differences are real, then racial classification schemes will not vary from time to time and place to place. (2) Racial classification schemes vary from time to time and place to place. For instance, the same mixed-race individual might be considered black or white in different places and at different times.^[4] Therefore, racial differences are not real. And, since racial differences are either real or social constructs, they must be social constructs.

This argument has two main problems.

The first premise is simply false because it elides the distinction between reality and opinion. Racial differences can be perfectly real, but people’s opinions about racial differences can vary widely. Since human beings are fallible, there can be many opinions about one and the same fact. But that does not make the facts any less objective. It just proves that people frequently fail to be as objective as the facts.

The oft-cited example of varying standards of blackness proves nothing about racial realities. First, the very idea of categorizing mixed-race individuals as black or white is problematic, simply because they are mixed. Given that they are neither black nor white, it is not surprising that people make different decisions if they have to classify them as one or the other. Thus it may be arbitrary social convention to say that Barack Obama is a black man. But it is an objective fact of nature that he had a white mother and a black father and is therefore half white and half black.

3. Cutting the Continuum

Another common argument for the social construction of race, and of knowledge in general, depends on the distinction between differences of degree and differences of kind, and runs as follows. (1) If racial differences are real differences of kind, then there should not be a continuum of intermediate types. (2) There are continuua of intermediate types between races. Therefore, there is only one human race, and distinctions between races are not found in nature but constructed by human beings. We carve up the continuum. Nature does not come separated into different kinds.^[5]

There are two major problems with this argument.

The first premise strikes me as highly dubious: Just because there are continua in nature does not mean that there are no real distinctions between parts of a given continuum. In terms of color, red may shade off into orange, and different cultures might have different words for colors and make finer or grosser distinctions between them. But does this mean that there are no real, observable differences between, say, red and blue?

Evolutionary theory posits the common origin and evolutionary continuity of all life on earth. Does that continuity mean, therefore, that there are no real differences between mammals and birds, or birds and reptiles, or nematodes and human beings? Is the difference between dinosaurs and humans merely a “social construct”? Did dinosaurs not exist before human beings were around to “socially construct” them?

If race is a social construct, is the human race as a whole a “social construct” too? What then is society? What is society made up of before the social construction of the human race? Is society also a social construct, which would seem to get us into an infinite regress (society is a social construct of a social construct of a social construct . . .)? Or is society not a social construct? Is it just a fact of nature? Is it just here? Then why can’t other things be facts of nature, like human beings and dinosaurs?

The second premise is also problematic. Anthropologists claim that all human races descend from common ancestors. But at different points in time, the five distinct human races—Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Congoid, Capoid, and Australoid—branched off and differentiated themselves from both their common ancestors and one another. After developing in isolation for enough time to attain distinctive traits, these races then came into contact with one another and gave rise to mixed populations.^[6] But the existence of racially mixed individuals no more overthrows the real distinction between races than the existence of green paint refutes the existence of blue and yellow paint.^[7]

4. The Silence of Science

Another common claim of the social constructivists is that science does not give adequate support to the idea of real racial distinctions, thus social constructivism is true. The argument runs as follows. (1) If there are real racial differences, then science will explain them. (2) Science has not explained racial differences. Therefore, there are no real racial differences. Since racial differences are either real or socially constructed, race is a social construct.

This argument has four grave problems.

First, race realism is based on observed racial differences, not on scientific theories of race. Human beings perceived racial differences long before the emergence of science, and we perceive them still, even those of us who are entirely innocent of racial science (as most social constructivists happen to be). Thus the first premise is simply false: The reality of race does not depend on the success or failure of scientific theories of race. Theories may rise and fall, but observable differences remain.

As for the second premise: Scientists would beg to differ.^[8] We can determine the race of an individual from the morpoholgical or genetic analysis of a single bone or strand of hair.

Of course, the social constructivists are not exactly clear about what constitutes the failure of science to explain race, but they generally insinuate that science has either (1) failed to come up with a single differentiating trait possessed by all members of a race and not possessed by other races,^[9] or (2) that no such theory has attained universal acceptance.

But the demand for a single essential differentiating trait for each race is arbitrary. Nature does not have to conform to our demands. And the fact that a theory does not attain universal acceptance has nothing to do with its truth, given the variability and fallibility of human opinions. Frankly, I believe that most social constructivists are intellectually dishonest. Thus no theory of objective racial differences will ever gain universal assent, no matter how well founded it may be.

Another problem with this argument is that it overlooks the fact that science is a process that unfolds over time. Thus even if the second premise were true, the conclusion does not follow, simply because science might not have come up with the correct account just yet. But wait.

A final problem with this argument is its assumption that in the absence of a scientific explanation of race, the only alternative is social constructivism. In fact, the default position is race realism based on empirical observation, which does not depend upon scientific explanation at all.

Social Constructivism as Social Construct

Social constructivists typically do not limit their thesis to race. Many claim that all knowledge is a social construct, or even that reality itself is a social construct. Thus it is fair to ask: Is social constructivism itself a social construct? If social constructivism is a social construct, this has three important implications:

1. Like all social constructs, social constructivism is the product of a unique set of historically contingent circumstances.

2. Since every society is divided into the rulers and the ruled, every social construct will be marked by the agenda of those who hold power.

3. If social constructivism is a social construct, not a natural fact, its acceptance or rejection is not based on reason and nature but on social incentives: moral and political commitment for the true believers—brainwashing, greed, and fear for the rest.

Social constructivism has a long philosophical pedigree, but today it functions as the metaphysical postulate of egalitarian social engineering projects to equalize the races by revolutionizing European founded and dominated societies. Of course, this revolution cannot produce racial equality, but it can create a new racial hierarchy in which Europeans are subordinate. Social constructivism thus serves the interests of a new emerging social elite, an alliance of rootless plutocrats, non-whites, sexual minorities, and other outsiders, in which the organized Jewish community is the senior and guiding partner. Thus social constructivism is an element of what Kevin MacDonald calls the “culture of critique”: the critique and overthrow of European civilization by Jewish-inspired and dominated intellectual movements like Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, feminism, deconstructionism, and most forms of postmodernism.^[10]

These movements are characterized by pseudo-science, obscurantism, and crass ethno-political advocacy. They acquired their influence not through reason and science but through the subversion of the educational, cultural, and political institutions of European societies. They perpetuate their influence though the indoctrination of the impressionable and the suppression of dissent.

Thus social constructivism cannot be defeated merely by criticizing its astonishingly poor arguments, which in large part are merely tools of self-conscious and cynical deception. If you lop off one argument, the hydra just sprouts another.

Instead, social constructivism must be defeated on its own terms: by altering the social conditions that give rise to it, by changing who rules this society, by disempowering and silencing its advocates just as they disempower and silence their critics. In short, social constructivism must be socially deconstructed and replaced by a new cultural and political hegemony that is aligned with reason, reality, and white interests. And we can do that in good conscience, because social constructivism is a false and pernicious ideology, nothing more.

Race realism is the default position of common sense. It is, moreover, supported by the best biological science. There is no good case for the social construction of race. It would be truer to say that society is a racial construct, meaning that society is the creation of human beings, who exist as part of nature and whose biological traits shape and constrain society and culture.

But once society is established, social conventions shape the underlying race by instituting eugenic and dysgenic breeding incentives or simply by legislating the extermination of entire groups. Nature comes before culture, but once culture exists, it turns back on and modifies nature.^[11] Only in this specific sense can one say that race is a (partial) social “construct,” although it would be better to drop the misleading language of construction altogether.

Counter-Currents, July 24, 2015

[1] An excellent basic textbook on race distinguished in terms of observable, morphological features that remains valid to this day is Carleton S. Coon, The Living Races of Man (New York: Random House, 1965). The book is particularly valuable for its many photographs illustrating typical racial, subracial, and hybrid types.

[2] For a more comprehensive survey of the case for race realism and against social constructivism, see Richard McCulloch, “Race: Reality and Denial,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 4 (Winter 2002–2003): 5–26.

[3] See Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007).

[4] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is a Social Construct,’” The Atlantic, May 15, 2013.

[5] An underlying assumption of this argument is that to truly know objective reality, the mind must be passive and reality must simply inscribe itself upon it. Thus if the mind is in any way active in the process of gaining knowledge, we no longer know objective reality but only human constructs. Ayn Rand offers a reductio ad absurdum of this argument, although she mistakenly applies it to Kant: “[Kant’s] argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.” Ayn Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” in For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 33.

[6] For an accessible account of racial evolution that remains valid today, see Carleton S. Coon, The Origin of Races (New York: Knopf, 1962). See also Coon’s The Living Races of Man.

[7] John R. Baker makes this point in his Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 100.

[8] For a simple and compelling summary of the science of race, see J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 2nd special abridged edition (Port Huron, Michigan: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000).

[9] See Joseph L. Graves, Jr., “The Biological Case against Race,” American Outlook, Spring 2002, p. 31.

[10] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998).

[11] For a recent and compelling account of genetic and cultural co-evolution, see Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

Years ago, during my brief academic career, one of my students explained to me how the Canadians were taking over Hollywood. At first, I thought that “Canadians” was just a euphemism for Jews. But no, as he continued, it became clear that he earnestly believed that the Canadians were taking over Hollywood, because it was cheaper to shoot movies and TV shows in Canada.

Around the same time, a friend told me of an encounter with a man who believed that feminism was a lesbian conspiracy. As evidence, he cited Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and even Ayn Rand. What did all these feminists have in common? Obviously, he said, they were lesbians . . .

I had a similar experience when I first heard good people explaining that the West is ruled by Satanic pedophile elites. Surely, I thought, this is just a euphemism for Jews. But no, although some of these people are well-aware of the Jewish Question, they point out that a lot of our elites are not Jewish—Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, for instance.

Yes, but by the same token, many of our elites aren’t actually pedophiles or Satanists, either.

Still, I am quite pleased that large numbers of people believe that the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, John Podesta, and their friends are Satanic pedophiles. It might not be literally true in all cases. But it does capture something about our bizarre rulers.

At the beginning of American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis argues that Patrick Bateman, though fictional, is true by quoting Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground: “such persons . . . not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, given the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.” The same goes for Satanic pedophiles. Call it literary truth, poetic justice.

If you can even be mistaken for a Satanic pedophile, you might be doing something wrong.

Also, is it really unfair to characterize people as “pedophile” when they gave Jeffrey Epstein a very lenient prison sentence for trafficking underage women, then had no difficulty associating with a convicted sex offender once he was out of jail? Obviously, none of these people felt dirty associating with Epstein. If not pedophiles themselves, they were content to give him social validation.

Thus I am content to leave Satanic Pedophile Elite Theory securely in place. I welcome the chilling effect it has on elite networking. Congressional candidates will be less likely to take junkets to Israel and checks from Miriam Adelson if they know that it will be someday taken as evidence that they rape children.

No matter how cocooned our elites are from the real world, they interact with ordinary people all the time. Now they have to wonder if their waiter, parking valet, dental hygienist, anesthesiologist, gardener, coke dealer, or nanny thinks they might be rapists, cannibals, and Devil worshippers. The more “diverse” these people are, the more likely they are to believe such things. It is just a taste of the fear and vulnerability our elites have imposed upon ordinary white people through multiculturalism and open borders.

My main problem with Satanic Pedophile Elite Theory is that it is too naïvely optimistic.

Let’s begin with the “Satanic” part.

Some people seem so evil that it is tempting to believe in supernatural causes. But why the temptation? Is it because you think that no human being could be that evil without supernatural help? Is it because you believe that human nature is somehow innocent? Or do you just think that you are immune to such corruption? That strikes me as naïve optimism. In truth, all human beings by nature are capable of monstrous behavior without any supernatural help. Bill Clinton didn’t need the Devil to make him do it—and neither do you.

Second, if you believe in supernatural causes of evil, presumably you also believe in supernatural solutions. That too strikes me as naïve. If we really are ruled by shockingly evil elites, we don’t have time to wait for supernatural help. We need to overthrow them and bring them to justice. And when we do bring them to justice, we should simply disregard claims of supernatural repentance. If these people have changes of heart, they can demonstrate that by informing on other criminals.

What’s worse than being ruled by Satanists? Being ruled by people who are so evil that demons aren’t required.

Now let’s deal with the “pedophile” part.

Both Epstein and Maxwell were convicted sex traffickers. Pimping is a crime, even with adults, and it is even more a crime with underage victims, who cannot consent to sex, thus every act of prostitution is also an act of rape. Nobody seriously believes that Epstein was the only one having sex with these women. Bill Gates didn’t get VD from the toilet seat on the Lolita Express.

Sex crimes have such a powerful hold on the imagination that most people seem to have lost sight of what Epstein was all about. The whole point of Epstein’s operation was espionage.

At a certain point, Epstein was asking his friends for secrets, and not just trade secrets but state secrets. Revealing state secrets is treason. Rape is a serious crime. But treason is far more serious than rape, because treason does not victimize a single person, it victimizes whole societies.

Thus I was amused when people treated the fact that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested for treason, not sex crimes, as a sign that the Epstein case is a “nothingburger.” No, the Epstein case was never just about sex. It was always about espionage.

Now let’s talk about the blackmail angle.

Many people think that Jeffrey Epstein filmed wealthy and powerful men having sex with underage girls, then used the tapes for blackmail purposes. Now, I am sure that Epstein kept records for blackmail purposes. But it seems charmingly naïve to believe that the likes of Bill Clinton, “randy” Andy Moutbatten-Windsor, Peter Mandelson, etc. would need to be blackmailed into betraying their oaths and nations.

Such people would sell out their nations as a favor to Epstein, who would do them favors in return. One of those favors might have been to supply them with underage girls. But there were probably a lot more important—and incriminating—favors in the offing, including bribes and kickbacks.

Now, if some of these people refused to share secrets with Epstein, I don’t doubt that he was willing and able to go the blackmail route. Moreover, if some of these people became enemies of Epstein, I am sure he was ready and willing to use blackmail as well.

But first of all, Epstein probably would not have needed to be so vulgar as to actually threaten exposure. It would simply be understood.

Second, when you commit a crime with someone like Epstein, only your first crime is purely voluntary, because once you have committed any crime, it can be held over your head to compel you to commit more of them. And it looks like Mandelson and the former prince Andrew committed far worse crimes than sex with underage girls.

What’s worse than Jeffrey Epstein using underage girls to blackmail wealthy and powerful men into betraying their countries? The possibility that blackmail was never even needed.

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2026/03/satanic-pedophile-elite-theory/

This is my opening statement in a debate on “Ethnonationalism vs. Imperialism” with Gregory Hood on June 10, 2023. Hood’s opening statement, which followed, can be found at Counter-Currents.[1]

By my count, there are 52 historically white sovereign states in the world today.[2] That’s not a lot. That’s one for every card in a standard deck. By “historically white,” I mean a state that had a white majority and white culture within the last 70 years, during which plunging white fertility rates and non-white immigration began changing historically white lands into multicultural, multiracial dystopias.

Note that I am simply talking about existing white “states” or “countries.” I will not talk about “nation-states” or “ethnostates,” because most existing white states don’t meet that description. The Vatican, for instance, is not the homeland of a people but the sovereign headquarters of a church. But this is the world we live in, so this is where we must begin.

In every one of these states, white birthrates are below replacement. If these trends persist, the white race will become extinct, even in the absence of non-white immigration, which is at alarming levels in most historically white countries.

How, then, can we save the white race? We need to play our cards right. We have been dealt 52 sovereign states. Sovereignty means a state controls its own internal affairs. A sovereign state is empowered to say “no” to all subsidiary jurisdictions. A sovereign state also has the power to say “no” to other sovereign states and to transnational bodies like the UN, the EU, and NATO. Sovereign states can control their own borders. They also have the power to create incentives and remove disincentives to healthy population growth.

Thus if whites around the world are to be saved, our goal should be to take power in as many historically white sovereign states as possible, preferably all of them. Then we need to use state power to raise white birthrates, end non-white immigration, and begin non-white emigration.

The wild card is the Vatican, which is untroubled by low birthrates among its celibate residents. Nor is it beset with immigrants. But the Vatican could still do a great deal to combat the demographic decline of white Catholics.

It sounds like a huge task for a small movement. But you shouldn’t wonder if a small but organized and fanatical minority can change the course of history, because they do so all the time. Truth be told, they are the only force that makes history. They always have. So how do we begin?

First, we need to spread the word about white demographic decline, its causes, and its cures. Then we need to find courageous and farsighted people in every white state to create white preservationist movements. These movements need to raise public awareness of anti-white demographic trends, propose workable solutions, and organize politically to contest for power on all levels of the system. But the ultimate goal of our movement should be to gain the highest levels of power in as many sovereign states as possible, then implement the necessary policies to save our people.

Who is most likely to support such efforts in the white states that exist today? They will tend to be people with strong attachments to their own kith and kin, including their own ethnic group. They will tend to have pro-natal, pro-family values. They are likely to be patriotic, ethnocentric, and even nationalistic. But they won’t fall for the fake civic nationalism that declares Africans with a Swedish passport to be Swedes. They know that every real Swede is a white person, although they also know that not every white person is a Swede. They will tend to be on the political Right. Because they are attached to their own homelands and serious about connecting with and converting their own people, they will tend to look to their own traditions for models of the movements, policies, and champions necessary to save their countries.

But that doesn’t mean that each of the 52 white preservationist movements must go it alone. Since all white lands face the same challenges and the same enemies, white advocates everywhere are more likely to triumph if they can cooperate with one another. They can share ideas, strategies, and tactics. They can support one another in international bodies. They can provide moral and material support to beleaguered comrades in other countries. Thus we need to maximize communication, cooperation, and solidarity among pro-whites worldwide. The more that we cooperate, the greater the chance that at least some white countries can be saved.

How can we maximize cooperation among pro-white movements? If two states wish to cooperate, they have to treat one another with mutual respect, meaning that they recognize the legitimacy of one another’s sovereignty and interests. What is true of cooperation between states is true of cooperation between nationalist movements, nationalists being those most likely to insist on respecting the sovereignty of their own homelands.

What is the quickest way to chill international cooperation among white advocates? To reject the sovereignty of any white state. Again, the people who are most likely to promote white survival in any particular state are also the most likely to be fervent patriots and nationalists. Attacking the sovereignty of a white state thus makes enemies of those who were most likely to be our friends, i.e., those who were most likely to cooperate with and strengthen us in the most important struggle in the world against overwhelming odds and diabolical enemies. I can’t think of a more self-defeating tactic if one’s aim is to foster world-wide cooperation among white preservationists.

There are two principal ways to reject the sovereignty of other white states.

The first is the bad old zero-sum nationalism of the past, in which nations struggled to preserve their own sovereignty while denying the sovereignty of their neighbors. They refused to treat others as they wished to be treated themselves. I hesitate to even call this position nationalism, since there is a better word for when one nation aggresses against another. We call that imperialism. I wish to reserve the word “nationalism” for the good kind of nationalists, who believe in nationalism for all nations. They treat other peoples as they would like to be treated themselves.

White preservationists don’t have the power to launch wars against other white states. But every white nation has historical grievances against other white nations due to the bad old nationalism. Oftentimes, it is possible to chill international cooperation between pro-white groups simply by rehashing old wars and old grievances.

Morally speaking, this is even worse than the bad old nationalists, who may have been evil, but at least they weren’t stupid. At least they believed they were gaining some tangible benefit by attacking their neighbors. But nobody benefits when white preservationists fall out over battles that took place in the past rather than pull together to fight the great battle of our time.

The second way to sabotage international cooperation is the idea of one great white state: a white imperium or “civilization-state.” I have criticized the principal arguments for one big white state in my essay “Against Imperialism,” and we shall surely revisit them in the course of this debate. But before we go into such arguments, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves how such discussions will impact our current struggle.

In today’s 52 historically white sovereign states, I know of pro-white individuals or groups in 44 of them. I don’t know of any in Bosnia, Moldova, Cyprus, San Marino, Lichtenstein, Andorra, Monaco, or the Vatican. But maybe I haven’t looked hard enough. I also know of white preservationists in majority non-white countries like Chile and Brazil.

All of these individuals and groups feel strong attachments to their families, their homelands, and their race. Many of them struggle daily with alienation, demoralization, and oppression. But the strongest prevail. They talk to family, friends, even complete strangers. They post ideas online. They form virtual and real-world networks. They found webzines, publishing houses, active clubs, and activist groups. Some of these groups grow into political parties. Some of these parties actually win elections. A few actually govern.

But all of these institutions, large or small, began with small, individual acts of courage in particular places and at particular times. Someday, I would like to see a worldwide congress of white advocates from all 52 states, as well as white minority populations around the world. I would like to see them all working together for the preservation of our race. But that dream will only emerge from the grassroots efforts of white advocates in their own countries.

What’s the last thing these people need to hear from us? How about that their efforts are “petty.” That they live in silly little “comic opera” states that don’t really have sovereignty. That their efforts are doomed to defeat. That their peoples and cultures have no future except as provinces of one great white state. But not to worry, they will be granted “autonomy” by the capital to speak their quaint languages and dance their quaint dances on their little Estonian and Slovenian and Hungarian reservations. So they should stop working to take state power in their own countries and wait for an emperor to save them.

If I were crafting propaganda to demoralize white activists, I couldn’t come up with a better message.

Personally, I think we should encourage grassroots white preservationist efforts in as many countries as possible, not pour cold water on them. But the “one white state” idea is a great gush of cold water, delivered from on high. Even if one white state were supported by strong arguments (which it is not), I want to argue that it is impolitic, bad optics, even bad taste to bring it up, because it denigrates the grassroots efforts of pro-whites around the world.

Ethnic nationalist movements, including separatist movements such as in Flanders, are where the energy and numbers are. Aside from a few would-be emperors, there isn’t much of a constituency for one big white state.

Fortunately, from my experience in the quaint, comic opera statelets of Europe, the idea of one white state has had little negative effect, largely because it is dismissed.

It is seen as an “American” idea, because most Europeans don’t recognize Americans as a distinct people, compounded out of other peoples. They see us as simply generic, deracinated whites hankering for a generic white state. I have criticized this false image of Americans in my essay “American Ethnic Identity,”[3] where I argue that Americans are a distinct white people who deserve a homeland of their own.

There are no generic white people. There are many white peoples distinguished by their languages, cultures, and histories. Thus White Nationalism does not mean one homeland for one white people. It means many homelands for many white peoples. White Nationalism in America is American nationalism. Just as White Nationalism in Spain is Spanish nationalism.

The idea of one big white state is also seen as apologetics for the bad old imperialist “nationalism.” Yockey’s Imperium was a defense of Hitler’s imperialism. Yockey’s The Enemy of Europe was a serpentine defense of Stalin’s. Today’s Eurasianists are simply dismissed as apologists for Russian/neo-Soviet imperial revanchism, which is in fact true.

Today’s Europe consists of the shattered remnants of old empires. Today’s Europe is in the pincers of American and Russian imperialism. Europe also faces an enemy within: the EU, which even now gnaws at its entrails. Given this history—given this present situation—I think we can understand why European nationalists want to preserve and perfect their sovereignty, not throw it all away.

But don’t nations and national identities change over time? Couldn’t whites grow out of their particular identities into a pan-white identity? Couldn’t they become like Americans, a new people compounded out of many different peoples? Yes, of course, today’s distinct white nations could disappear. Countless peoples throughout history have disappeared not just by slaughter but by assimilation.

But how does that sound to the people whose grassroots efforts we wish to encourage today? Nobody wants to hear that his identity does not matter. Nobody wants to hear that he is regarded merely as fungible raw material for someone else’s grandiose dream. That sounds like the globalist dystopia we all want to reject, just a smaller, whiter version of it. It does not sound like the respect that is the bedrock of productive collaboration.

America was founded by people who were willing to give up their homelands over religion, ideology, and money. The people who remained behind were not willing to do that. Moreover, the passionate identitarians among them are the least receptive to such a proposal. And those are precisely the people we need to work with.

Why do I oppose one white state? Because I think the idea harms rather than helps the cause of white survival. We have been dealt 52 sovereign historically white entities. That’s where white preservationism must begin. That’s where it has begun. That’s where the energy is. That’s where the people are. It seems mad to throw it all away to chase a meme. If we are going to save our race, we will save it one white state at a time.

Counter-Currents, June 19, 2023

[1] Gregory Hood, “The Empire is Inevitable,” Counter-Currents, June 20, 2023.

[2] In alphabetical order: Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cuba, Cypress, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, Uruguay, United Kingdom, United States, Vatican City.

[3] Greg Johnson, “American Ethnic Identity,” in In Defense of Prejudice.

Quinn Slobodian
Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right
London: Allen Lane, 2025

Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards is a pre-history of what in 2015 was called the “libertarian to Alt Right pipeline.” Just as Donald Trump’s populist presidential run in 2015 was heralded by changes in the Zeitgeist, Patrick Buchanan’s populist presidential runs in the 1990s followed upon metapolitical conversations beginning in the late 1980s. According to Slobodian:

Changing demographics—an aging white population matched by an expanding nonwhite population—made some right-wing neoliberals and libertarians rethink the conditions necessary for capitalism. Perhaps some cultures, and even some races, might be predisposed to market success while others were not? Perhaps cultural homogeneity was a precondition for social stability, and thus the peaceful conduct of market exchange and enjoyment of private property? (p. 10)

These intellectuals offered a new case for nationalism and populism by fusing free market economics (principally the Austrian School, hence the title) and “arguments borrowed from cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary psychology and in some cases genetics, genomics, and biological anthropology” (p. 10). Slobodian focuses on such figures as Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Peter Brimelow. They drew upon the biological research of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, the authors of The Bell Curve (1994), Richard Lynn, and J. Philippe Rushton (who is hardly mentioned).

Their allies and fellow travelers included the “paleo-conservatives” Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and Thomas Fleming. Of course, a whole book could be devoted to the paleocons, but they are marginal in Slobodian’s narrative because he is primarily a historian of Austrian School economics and libertarianism.

Oddly, Slobodian refers to libertarianism and the broader free-market movement as “neoliberalism,” which to me means the embrace of market economics by center-Left politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s. Instead of speaking of the Alt Right, Slobodian speaks of the broader populist Right. His timeframe is also much wider: most of the changes he discusses happened in the 1990s, but he traces the roots back much further. Still, the transformation he describes is essentially the same.

Classical liberalism and/or free market economics are individualistic in their basic morals and methods. Yet somehow people who once embraced those ideas came to embrace racialism and/or nationalism, which are morally and methodologically collectivist. Since you can’t derive collectivist conclusions from individualist premises, these thinkers abandoned key individualist premises.

In other words, we are talking about a fundamental transformation of worldviews, a “conversion” or a “paradigm shift.” Thus it is a very interesting question for intellectual historians to explain why so many libertarians and other free market supporters made that jump.

But Slobodian seems ill-equipped to understand the transformation he discusses. He is a Leftist historian of libertarianism and the Austrian School of economics. He is professor of international history at Boston University. His previous books include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018) and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (London: Allen Lane, 2023).

Slobodian doesn’t really put his convictions or analytical tools on the table. But his basic premises appear to be Marxist. Thus he doesn’t explore the truth or coherence or contradictions of the ideas he discusses. Instead, he seems to think that they all hang together because they are ideological expressions of capitalism.

Thus Slobodian simply offers a narrative of how these ideas emerged: who said what, who influenced whom, and the publications, think tanks, organizations, and meetings where these discussions took place.

The result is a very useful study of one of the most successful Right-wing metapolitical projects of all time: the triumph of markets over socialist central planning, for today the market economy is every bit as hegemonic as globalism and multiculturalism.

But on Slobodian’s account, this metapolitical project had unintended consequences, or as he would have it: “bastard” offspring. For many of the pro-market thinkers and organizations he discusses contributed to the rise of Right-wing populism.

Basically, there are two ways one can go down “the pipeline.”

First, if one is a wholly consistent classical liberal, one needs to make a fundamental paradigm shift from individualism to collectivism.

Second, if one never had been a consistent individualist, meaning that one also held some collectivist premises, then the process of conversion is not so much the replacement of one coherent worldview with another as it is the rejection of an inconsistent worldview for a more consistent one.

Of course, that change can go in both directions: towards individualism or collectivism. But the tendency was toward collectivism.

A paradigm shift also involves a search for greater coherence when one confronts facts that cannot be explained within one’s current framework, thus forcing one to adopt a new framework.

Both sorts of changes are evident in Slobodian’s narrative, but as we will see, many of the people you thought were doctrinaire classical liberals were never all that doctrinaire or classical liberal.

Slobodian’s main narrative begins at the end of the Cold War. The economic argument against socialist central planning had been won. But the Left simply morphed into different guises, chiefly radical environmentalism, feminism, and anti-white identity politics. Those who only cared about economics could declare victory. But those who had a wider slate of concerns—basically, the desire to preserve our civilization and even our race—simply recalibrated.

The deep root of Leftism is egalitarianism. The Left had abandoned socialism but not egalitarianism. Thus Rightists took new aim at the idea of human equality.

As individualists, they were always willing to countenance individual inequality. But the most plausible accounts of inequality make reference to biological and cultural forms of evolution, which are group phenomena, which means looking at history in terms of collectives, not just individuals.

Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), the Austrian economist and political thinker, was very interested in both biological and social evolution. He is the main focus of chapter 1, “Of Savannahs and Satellites.” He argued that socialism is “atavistic” because it arises from solidaristic moral sentiments that evolved in hunter-gatherer societies. These sentiments must simply be suppressed to sustain the global market order. Thus Hayek wished to suppress the results of biological evolution to sustain the effects of social evolution. It is very much a conservative position, with interesting parallels to the argument of Freud’s late conservative work Civilization and Its Discontents.

When I was an undergraduate libertarian, Hayek was my introduction to both social and sociobiological evolutionary theories, which led me to Hume and Burke on the one hand and E. O. Wilson on the other. Both lines of thought eventually contributed to my discovery and embrace of the populist Right. It turns out that I was one among many.

Egalitarians, of course, embrace cultural explanations for inequality, since culture is mutable over time. Whenever an egalitarian declares something a “social construct,” that is equivalent to slapping a “Condemned” sign on a building. It is slated for destruction, to be replaced by something boxy and boring. Egalitarians reject biological explanations for inequality, because only eugenics and, eventually, genetic engineering can alter biological inequality. Thus the critics of egalitarianism were naturally drawn to biology.

Interestingly, it was the followers of the other great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), who embraced biological evolution, led by Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995). This is the main topic of chapter 2, “The Rock of Biology.” According to Rothbard, “Biology stands like a rock in the face of egalitarian fantasies” (p. 42). These fantasies include not just the equality of individuals, but the equality of the sexes and races.

In 1989, Rothbard declared himself a “paleo-libertarian,” basically rejecting libertarian cultural Leftism. Rothbard’s principal collaborators were Lew Rockwell and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Rothbard also sought allies among the “paleo-conservative” movement, a term coined by Paul Gottfried for a rejection of neoconservatism for actual conservatism.

These allies included Gottfried himself plus Sam Francis and Thomas Fleming of Chronicles magazine. Together they formed a united front against the neoconservatives. In 1989, the “paleo alliance” formed the John Randolph Club, named for a former planation owner and advocate of shipping blacks back to Africa.

The paleo-libertarians openly championed the right to discriminate on racial and sexual grounds.

The breakup of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars led to discussions of the virtues of small, ethnically homogeneous states.

David Duke’s election to the Louisiana state house in 1989 and his run for Senate in 1990 led to a serious consideration of populism, or, as Rothbard put it in an essay recommending “Right-Wing Populism”: “a strategy of Outreach to the Rednecks” (p. 59).

Rothbard also courted neo-Confederates. It was even rumored that he tried to lead a chorus of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied” at one of his conferences.

Sadly, Rothbard died in 1995 at the age of 68. Deprived of its charismatic, bizarre, and highly energetic impresario, the paleo alliance dissolved. But Rothbard’s synthesis of Austrian Economics, race realism, nationalism, and populism continues to be championed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who was widely read and cited in the Alt Right.

One of Slobodian’s most interesting discoveries is that Ludwig von Mises himself was something of a race realist (pp. 48–50), much more so than Hayek. Moreover, in the late 1980s, Rothbard’s paleo-libertarian turn coincided with a schism between the followers of Mises and the followers of Hayek, most of them at George Mason University. Thus this book might better be titled Mises’ Bastards. Although a case could be made that the paleolibertarians were entirely legitimate offspring.

Slobodian’s chapter 3, “Ethno-Economy,” focuses largely on Peter Brimelow. Brimelow is not an Austrian school economist or a libertarian. He is a conservative journalist with a focus on business and immigration. From early on, Brimelow had an interest in multiculturalism and the “national question.” In 1987, he published The Patriot Game on Canada, which has always had identity issues because of the Quebec Question. In 1995, Brimelow published Alien Nation, a critique of free market arguments for open borders. His central thesis is that “a belief in free markets does not commit you to free immigration” (p. 65).

Brimelow’s arguments made headway despite William F. Buckley’s attempts to purge immigration restrictionists from polite conservatism. In 1999, Brimelow founded VDARE.com, which led the fight for patriotic immigration reform until it ceased publication in 2024 due to blatantly partisan legal persecution by the State of New York.

Over the years, VDARE platformed White Nationalists, Alt Right figures, and defenders of Brexit and Donald Trump, thus serving as another pipeline from libertarian and conservative thought to national populism.

Classical liberals and market economists operate on the assumption that their ideas are universally valid and can be exported globally. Brimelow, however, seems never to have believed that the market system could pop up anywhere on the planet. He believed that it had cultural and even racial prerequisites. These conditions that make the market possible are called the “metamarket.” Brimelow is quite masterful at getting economists and classical liberals to confront questions about the cultural and racial specificity of what they advocate.

Another of Slobodian’s fascinating discoveries is one of Brimelow’s interviews with Milton Friedman, in which Friedman makes some surprisingly candid and non-doctrinaire remarks: “It’s a curious fact that capitalism has developed and really only come to fruition in the English-speaking world. . . . I don’t know why this is so, but the fact has to be admitted. . . . Beyond a certain point [capitalism] may not be [exportable]” (p. 84).

Given Brimelow’s discussion of the non-economic conditions of the market economy, it strikes me as odd that Slobodian accuses Brimelow of trying to “reduce” these to economic factors. In truth, Brimelow is trying to get people who think only in economic terms to acknowledge the existence of non-economic conditions for the market.

Slobodian’s chapter 4, “Neurocastes,” focuses on race realists like Charles Murray and Richard Lynn. There were a few surprises. For instance, although I knew that Charles Murray’s first book Losing Ground (1984) was solidly in the classical liberal tradition, with all its universalist assumptions about human nature and motivations, I did not know that Richard Lynn had similar classical liberal priors. I also learned of the importance of two Jewish economists, Stefan Possony (1913–1995) and Nathaniel Weyl (1910–2005) in bridging the gap between economics and race science.

The final chapter, “Goldbugs,” deals with various advocates of “hard money,” which I regard as libertarian baggage that the populist Right should leave behind.

My initial reaction to Hayek’s Bastards was quite negative. The Introduction is called “Volk Capital,” which calls to mind the Marxist critique of fascism as the refuge of the petite bourgeoisie. But Slobodian generally allows the facts to speak for themselves, and the result for me was a renewed appreciation for a milieu that I had bidden good riddance to by 1999. In my last few moves, I haven’t even bothered to unpack my Mises and Hayek books.

I still have a visceral reaction when I think back to a particular conference I attended in the late 1990s when I raised the question of tariffs to protect strategically important industries and was told flatly that such arguments were tantamount to “racism.”

There are plenty such people in classical liberal circles to this day. Back in the 1990s, I felt quite alone among them. But Slobodian corrected me on this. There were many dissident voices, all moving in pretty much the same direction. Indeed, I was watching and reading along carefully as paleo-libertarianism was born and the paleo alliance was formed, although I gravitated more toward the paleocon camp, especially Sam Francis. I don’t recall where I heard of them first, but I read The Bell Curve and Michael Levin’s masterpiece Why Race Matters shortly after they were published. (I read Levin’s Feminism and Freedom when it was first published as well.) All of this was well before I heard of American Renaissance or White Nationalism. But the ground was well-prepared.

I stepped out of the racial nationalist end of the pipeline around 1999, about a decade before the term “Alt Right” was even coined. I played some small role in helping others make the journey when I was editor of The Occidental Quarterly. I set up prize competition and a special issue on Libertarianism and White Racial Nationalism.[1]

Only a few years later, a trickle turned to a flood in the aftermath of the Ron Paul 2012 campaign. One of the catalysts was a rejection of the Leftist lies and hysteria surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin being parroted within the libertarian camp.

So what explains “the pipeline”? I can offer some thoughts by reflecting on my own journey.

I read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and Ayn Rand’s Anthem in high school, followed by Atlas Shrugged and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal my freshman year of college. In my sophomore year, I read Ludwig von Mises’ mammoth treatises Human Action and Socialism. By the end of that year, I switched my major to economics.

The following summer is when I got into Hayek. I began with The Road to Serfdom. I never got into Hayek’s purely economic writings. Instead, I focused on his political and legal philosophy, essays in the history of ideas, and writings on the philosophy of the human sciences. Soon, I switched my major to philosophy.

Rand got me interested in Aristotle. Hayek got me interested in early 20th-century German-language debates about the differences between the natural sciences and the human sciences, through which I discovered phenomenology and hermeneutics. He also interested me in anti-rationalist/social evolutionist thinkers like Hume and Burke.

While I was still an undergraduate, two texts decisively nudged me away from doctrinaire rights-based classical liberalism toward a more conservative approach.

One was Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. Sowell showed me that classical liberalism is part of the rationalist “unconstrained vision” of man and society, which I rejected in favor of the “constrained vision” to which Hayek introduced me.

The other text was an editorial by Edith Efron from Reason.[2] I have carried a photocopy around for decades. Efron argued that if libertarianism would cause civilization to collapse back to the Stone Age, doctrinaire libertarians would not flinch from that prospect, whereas she would. The point she conveyed is that she had a prior commitment to the high civilization of the West. She embraced libertarianism only insofar as she thought that it preserved and augmented Western civilization. I realized that I shared the same bedrock commitment. Basically, I stopped being a libertarian when I realized that it really would take mankind back to the Stone Age.

Liberal individualism helps create peaceful, prosperous, high-trust white societies. But liberal individualism is pretty much a white Western thing. It doesn’t export well to the rest of the world, because the other races and cultures are far more collectivist. Moreover, liberal individualism is very bad at assimilating collectivist groups.

In fact, liberal individualism goes from a strength to a weakness when we import collectivist communities. When a member of such a group wants something from us, he will appeal to our individualism and fairness, and if he is the best, he will win. However, when he has a favor to dispense, he will not reciprocate our fairness. Instead, he will seek to bestow his benefits to members of his community. Such behavior will eventually lead to individualist societies being hollowed out and destroyed by parasitic collectivist tribes.

The only way to stop this is to recognize that liberal individualism is itself a collective thing: it arises only in specific racial and cultural collectives, and it can be preserved only by preserving those collectives from rival collectives by erecting political barriers. Thus the libertarian idea that we can extend liberal individualism to the whole world is a civilizational suicide pact.

But within the borders of white societies, I still think private property, private enterprise, and private life are good things. I still believe in individual rights. I still believe we owe a great deal to individual creative geniuses. But all these good things must be consistent with the common good of the societies that make them possible. To that extent, I believe I am a legitimate heir of Hayek.

Notes

[1] Libertarianism and White Racial Nationalism, The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 1 (2011).

[2] Edith Efron, “The Petr Principle,” Reason, vol. 10, no 1, May 1978: pp. 62, 71.